The multinational character of Crooked Timber means that there’s bound to be more than one view about who is going to win Rugby Union’s Six Nations tournament this time around. The smart money is on Ireland who have the best player in Brian O’Driscoll and home advantage against the stronger teams. I’ll be tuned into Wales v England this afternoon and there’s every chance of an upset this time. Unfortunately for Kieran and Henry (and for Brian who is an interested neutral) I shouldn’t think that a microsecond of this will get transmitted in North America.
Since it’s the season for spreading good news stories, here’s a delightful story about Pedro Martínez and the resources he’s put back into his home town of Manoguayabo. It’s easy to feel jealous (or worse) towards sports stars for all the money they earn, but these feelings are hard to maintain when the star does so much good with the money.
For years Pedro has been my favourite player on my favourite (non-Australian) sporting team, and it was rather sad when he left so he could get more money from the New York Mets. But it’s hard to feel bad about Pedro getting the extra $13 million or so the Mets were offering when so much of it will be returned to Manoguayabo.
I may be the only Timberite who was both able to watch last night’s Spain—England football (soccer to you guys) “friendly” international and who also had the inclination to do so. It was a miserable spectacle on nearly all fronts (the only mitigating factor being the brilliance of some of the Spanish passing). There was petulant violence from the England players, especially the child Rooney who was subsituted before he could be red-carded. Rooney threw the black armband he was wearing for Emlyn Hughes to the ground as he left the pitch (a gesture which won’t be forgotten when he visits Anfield next). England’s footballing display was miserably inept, but though I admired the Spanish on the pitch I was willing Jermaine Defoe or Sean Wright-Phillips to score at the end (they didn’t) as every touch of the ball by one of England’s black players was met by loud monkey-chants from every corner of the ground. Anyone who deludedly believes that the population of Europe consists largely of liberal sophisticates would have received an education from last night’s game.
It’s impossible to think about anything other than baseball today, so time for a little Yankee-bashing. One of the odd things about the Yankees self-promotion (which I’m sadly exposed to being back in NY) is their frequent comparison between themselves and all other teams in the world. This can lead to problems, because while the Yankees have won more titles than any other team in major North American sports, they haven’t won more titles than lots of teams in major sports outside America. But it can also lead to interesting questions. Here’s an example from Steven Goldman, who is in general one of the best sportswriters on the internets.
New York has won more sporting championships than any other city in the world.
Is this true?
My first instinct was that Glasgow would have more championships that New York running away, but maybe that’s overlooking the New York teams (especially the baseball Giants) that have left. Or maybe it’s unfair to include Glasgow. It’s certainly unfair, for example, to include all the AFL championships won by Melbourne teams from back in the years when all, or all but one, of the AFL teams were from Melbourne. So which is the most successful sporting city in the world?
Speaking of the nature of excellence, my sister-in-law Sarah Dupré Healy ran her first marathon today — the Chicago Marathon. She finished seventeenth in the Women’s Race, which is not too shabby, given there were about 40,000 people running altogether. Conditions were windy and she suffered a lot over the last 10k or so, dropping a few minutes off what had been a 2:38 pace. But I think it’s just fantastic that she finished in the Top 20, which is why I’m telling all of you about it.
My head is clearly stuck some time in the 1970s, because I just can’t understand this story :
The Amateur Boxing Association is set to offer Amir Khan £70,000 a year, tax free, to stay in the amateur ranks. Khan has said he wants to remain an amateur with the ABA planning to make a formal offer to the Olympic silver medallist on Friday. …. [Lennox] Lewis said he did not subscribe to the view that Khan needed to turn pro to make the most of the commercial opportunities available. “There is a lot of amateur money out there,” said Lewis.
Huh?
“If God had wanted us to play football in the clouds, he’d have put grass up there.”
The BBC reports that Brian Clough has died. A sad loss after a sad decline. But his achievements — including back-to-back European Cups with an otherwise unexceptional team — speak for themselves. Bill Shankly said of him “He’s worse than the rain in Manchester. At least the rain in Manchester stops occasionally.” Now he’s stopped forever.
Alan Keyes said today that “Christ would not vote for Barack Obama,” apparently because Obama is pro-choice. But clearly the reason that Jesus would not vote for Obama is that there is just no way He would move from California to Illinois in the first place.
Ireland won a gold medal at the Olympics this year, but after the appalling intervention of ex-priest and arch-gobshite Neil Horan in the marathon, Cian O’Connor’s performance in the showjumping competition wont’ be remembered as Ireland’s main contribution to the games. Dressed in a kilt and green hat with a handwritten sign on his chest reading “The Second Coming is Near,” Horan attacked the leader of the race, Brazil’s Vanderlei de Lima, at around the 21-mile mark. He knocked the guy over into the crash barriers. Amazingly, de Lima got up and — though he looked like he was in agony — continued running, only to be beaten into third place. Horan’s last public appearance was at the British Grand Prix at Silverstone last year, where he ran onto the track. You’ll notice from the news photos that he was wearing the same outfit then as now.
I am of course horribly embarrassed on behalf of Ireland generally, and I hope some of Horan’s sneaking regarders back home will be feeling bad now that they’ve pissed off the whole of Brazil and forever burned their already-slim chances of hitting it off with any of their volleyball players. At the same time, I despaired at the behavior of the Greek officials at the race. Although de Lima had a policeman riding alongside him, and the route was lined with people in official T-Shirts, and this was supposed to be games with the highest degree of camera surveillance in history, Horan had no trouble running out onto the course and attacking the leader. The crowd reacted faster than the police. Even if you didn’t know that Horan had a history of interrupting major sporting events, you’d think that someone at the race might have suspected that the guy in the leprechaun costume with a Star of David on his leg and a message about the end of the world plastered to him just might have been planning to do something when the leading runners and the TV cameras hove into sight.
Final call for anyone who wishes to joing the Crooked Timberites fantasy football league (instructions here ). I’m off to Germany on Saturday, so anyone who doesn’t email me details before tomorrow evening will get added in the middle of next week. (You can always register a dummy team now, mail me your number and tinker with your selection until the Saturday deadline).
In the brutally competitive, take-no-prisoners world of fantasy sports team managment, sometimes we have to take matters into our own hands. That’s when McSweeney’s guide to heckling might come in handy.
While you’re out and about in your town, try heckling some of the locals to build your confidence and work on your repertoire.To the Mailman: “Karl Malone would be ashamed.”
To the Paperboy: “Who taught you how to throw? David Cassidy?”
To the Grocer: “This orange blows.”
To the Bank Clerk: “I can buy and sell you at will.”
To the Bus Driver: “Flunk out of chauffeur school?”
To the Ice-Cream-Truck Driver: “Flunk out of bus-driver school?”
To the Town Vampire: “Even I have bigger teeth. And you call yourself a reanimated corpse that has risen from the grave to suck the blood of the living? You suck. In a nonliteral, yet highly amusing, way.”
To the Waiter: “How’s that whole aspiring-to-be-an-actor thing going? Not good? At least you got your degree in …? Oh. I’m truly sorry. Can I get a refill?”
As some of you may have noticed the new English football season is upon us. The BBC is running its fantasy football game for the last time this season, and I’ll be entering as I usually do. There’s a facility to run a mini-league consisting of friends, relations, enemies, critics, critical critics etc. So if any contributor, regular commenter or reader wants to join our league — the Crooked Timberites — they are very welcome to do so. You have to register with the BBC and choose your team first, and then email your PIN to me, the Chairman of the League, at crookedfootball-at-yahoo.co.uk . Those who know nothing whatsoever about football can always use the “lucky dip” facility to have the BBC computer pick a team for them. Try to register before 1230 BST on Saturday, 28 August 2004
As most of you reading this outside America will know, the 2004 Olympics have begun. Of course in America none of this has been seen yet, because it is technologically impossible or something to broadcast live from Greece. So the film of the opening ceremony is being sent by carrier pigeon to New York, where it will arrive in a few hours to be shown.
Now I don’t really care when or where the opening ceremony is shown. But I do care about when and where they show Olympic events in which Australians have a decent chance of doing well, especially swimming. And if one is stuck in the televisual hell-hole that is the United States, the answer is “Nowhere live, and unknown time and location on tape delay.” Because NBC refuses to show any swimming events live, and refuses (as far as I can tell) to say just when it will show events on tape delay, it is practically impossible to tell how much of a commitment will be needed to actually see Australians (or anyone else you might be interested in) in action. If you’re lucky NBC will, just like a cable company, say that the event you want will turn up sometime in a 4 hour interval. Just why Americans tolerate this kind of behaviour from a TV station is a little unclear, but I can’t imagine it would be possible to get away with such behaviour anywhere else in the western world.
Tom W. Bell has a fun post analyzing surfing as a system of non-state enforced property rights. Surfers apparently have a very-well developed set of norms regarding who gets which wave. Bell, who is a hard-core libertarian, sees this as mostly reflecting surfers’ “profound respects for property rights.” Surfers, by his account, behave like Lockeans when divvying up the waves. However, there’s an alternative explanatory framework that does a better job, I reckon, of explaining what’s going on - Lin Ostrom’s account of common pool resources, and the rules governing them.
Bell’s emphasis on natural property rights seems to me to obscure the real explanatory factors in his story as he tells it - the existence of a community, with collective norms on how a common resource should be allocated. As Bell describes it:
How do surfers enforce their wave rights? For the most part, they rely on the gentle arts of social suasion. Surfers bobbing in the line-up make up a community of sorts, one often strengthened by the presence of locals who know and look out for each other.
This suggests two things. First, that surfers face a collective dilemma - how to manage a common pool resource - a resource in which as Ostrom describes it
it is difficult to exclude or limit users once the resource is provided, and one person’s consumption of resource units removes those units from those available to others.
In this example, the common pool resource is the ocean (as a source of surfable waves), and the units are the waves themselves. Once a unit (a wave) is removed from the resource, others can’t use it; as Bell describes it, “one wave face can generally support only one ride at a time.” This suggests that the apparent consonance of surfing rules with individual property rights is less a reflection of the surfing ethos than of the nature of the good itself. While the resource (the ocean) is collective, the individual units of that resource, by their nature, can usually only be enjoyed by one individual. The collective good of the ocean remains collective. As the surfing rules that Bell links to describe it
Share the ocean, not only with other surfers, but also the marine life which lives in it … The sea is there for everyone to use and share.”
Second, Bell’s account, as I read it, provides some evidence that what governs individual behaviour is not so much a sense of natural property rights as a community, with specific informal rules as to which kinds of behaviour are socially acceptable, and which are unacceptable. This suggests that surfing is not so much a libertarian utopia as an anarchy (in Michael Taylor’s sense of the word) in which a community provides an alternative governance mechanism to the state. As Ostrom documents, communities can do a pretty good job of governing collective resources if they’re allowed to, through precisely the kinds of informal sanctions that Bell talks about. Furthermore, as Ostrom documents, community sanctions often escalate, beginning with a warning that the offender is breaking the rules, and escalating punishments if the offender continues to behave badly. Compare with Bell:
Getting the stink-eye for dropping in on somebody else’s wave stings badly enough. Sanctions against repeat offenders may escalate to sharp words or, in extraordinary cases, to physical violence. When someone dropped in on me recently, for instance, I first forebore the offense, then took alarm at his unsafe proximity and verbally warned him to back-off. Finally, when that proved unavailing, I put my hand on the punk’s chest, shoved him off his board, and finished out my ride.
Indeed, the rule that surfers who repeatedly waste waves draw blame (which Bell attributes to some version of Locke’s second proviso) could equally easily be interpreted as instantiating a general community norm of fairness in the allocation of resources. In the surfing rules linked to above, surfers are admonished not to be selfish.
DON’T HOG THE WAVES: Don’t try to catch every single wave that comes through. You will only create animosity amongst the others in the line up and will be seen as a wave pig or hog. If you have the paddling power or a board that allows you to get into the waves a lot earlier remember this, learn to give and you will receive. Share the waves around and learn to give a few to the other crew. Respect gets respect.
Bell closes the post by suggesting that the academy subsidize his surfing travels.
I eager solicit funding so that I can expand my study to include cross-cultural comparisons of the role that property rights play in surfing by, for instance, extensive experimental work in Hawaii, Costa Rica, Fiji, and Australia.
He’s joking of course - but there probably is an interesting research agenda in all of this. If Stephen Levitt can get into the AER by analyzing penalty shootouts in football, there’s no reason why Bell shouldn’t be able to rustle up a grant to do some proper work on CPR, rules and surfdom.
via BoingBoing.
Update: some additions regarding surfing rules.
The Irish athlete Cathal Lombard has tested positive for EPO, the now commonly-abused drug that radically boosts red blood cell production. Lombard’s path seems to have been a standard one. Nothing special for most of his career, his 5,000 and 10,000 meter times started improving radically when he changed coaches a couple of years ago. In interviews he put it all down to training smarter and overhauling his approach to running.
Assuming the tests are confirmed, Lombard’s story shows just how phenomenally effective performance-enhancing drugs are these days. Lombard is basically a decent club runner: certainly faster than most of us, but he never won anything in competition and he certainly couldn’t touch the likes of, say, Mark Carroll, the leading Irish men’s middle distance runner of his generation. Just compare and contrast their respective accomplishments over the years. And yet at the age of 26, Lombard started knocking down his 5 and 10k PBs in 20 or 30 second chunks over a period of months, to the point where earlier this year he smashed Mark’s National 10k record by 13 seconds. Now imagine what happens if you give EPO to someone who is really, really talented to begin with.
This sort of thing makes it hard to get really enthusiastic about the upcoming Olympics, because it’s clear that for everyone who’s caught there are a bunch more who evade detection. But which ones? It’s hard to catch even textbook cases using known substances, let alone truly elite competitors who use stuff that testing agencies don’t even know exists. Some sports, like professional cycling, are so obviously soaked in chemicals that everyone has simply agreed to look the other way. On the track and field circuit, there are a lot of fairly clear-cut opinions about who’s clean and who isn’t, and a lot of justified resentment from honest athletes who see their own natural talent and hard work count for nothing courtesy of someone else’s course of injections. They face a harsh choice when they see the likes of Lombard accelerating away from them on the back straight towards Olympic glory, corporate sponsorship and popular adulation.
My first real encounter with Norman Geras’s writings was when I read his excellent Marx and Human Nature. I subsequently saw him give a talk on the book at one of the SWP’s Marxism conferences (87?), and was struck by the way that he kept his temper despite extraordinary provocation by the audience. This experience combined with my more or less simultaneous encounter with the work of the analytical Marxists, and a class I took with (my subsequent colleague) Andy Levine, to convince me that normative philosophy was worth doing — resulting in my exiting philosophy of language for political philosophy.
So I was delighted to discover that he writes about the greatest sport human beings have invented. I was pleased, but also incredibly frustrated recently when I had the good fortune to stay at the home of a friend who possesses a copy of Two Views from the Boundary. I got half way through the book — and had to leave on the next flight out. Now, the relative obscurity (sorry Norm) of his cricket writing means it is not readily available in the US, and it never occurred to me to seek the book directly from him till I found this ancient post on his blog. Now that I have selfishly secured shipment of numerous copies for myself, my dad (he doesn’t read CT, so it’ll be a surprise as long as you don’t tell him), my godfather, etc, I can advertise the offer to all. Email Norm at his site, and see if he’ll cut you a deal on his cricket writing.
The New York Times tells us today about some bloke who’s playing golf across Mongolia, treating the entire country as a course, and dividing it into eighteen holes. Par is 11,880.
Sounds impressive - until you consider the Surrealist Golf Course in Maurice Richardson’s The Exploits of Engelbrecht (previously discussed in this post). According to Richardson
To start with, a surrealist golf course has only one hole. But don’t get the idea that it’s any easier on that account. … Par is reckoned at 818181, but anything under 100,000 is considered a hot score. The hazards are desperate, so desperate that at the clubhouse bar you always see some pretty ravaged faces and shaky hands turning down an empty glass for the missing members.
These hazards include Sairpents, Vultures, the Valley of Dry Bones, Muezzins and Butlins Holiday Camp. In comparison, the Gobi Desert sounds like a cakewalk.
The BBC commentators have been comparing Otto Rehhagel to Socrates and invoking Greece’s ancient past. And why not? Moments like tonight are what make football the great sport it is.
Germany, Spain, Italy, England, all gone. And now France! This is getting interesting.
Brian Weatherson watched the England—Croatia game with us the other night, so he can attest to the general level of invective directed towards the television at Chateau Bertram. But, whilst I didn’t watch last night’s proceedings with detachment, I can say that one event followed another with the depressing inevitability all long-term England watchers expect. The early goal (Michael Owen, 6/1 at bluesquare.com — thanks very much!) reminiscent of Germany-England 1996 followed by the Portuguese equalizer just before the 90 minutes. Then the disallowed goal (an exact re-run of England-Argentina 1998), all ending, finally, with the penalty-shoot-out (too many precendents to bother listing here). At least we can enjoy the rest of the tournament free of “Rooneymania” and most of the St George’s crosses will disappear from assorted motor vehicles. Come on the Czech Republic!
Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence: in other words it is war minus the shooting.
That’s always been pretty much my least favourite Orwell quote, but I couldn’t help thinking about it when contemplating tonight’s Netherlands-Germany match at Euro 2004. The Scotsman has a useful guide to the history of footballing enmity between the two countries and one of the protagonists of the last really nasty episode (scroll down to #6) — Rudi Voeller — is now the German coach. The football should be pretty good too … at least from the Dutch.
They’ll be dancing in the streets of Glasgow and Cardiff tonight after England’s last minute collapse to France at Euro 2004. Not fatal, but very deflating to English morale. It is the worst way to lose a game, to think you’re home and dry and then to concede twice in extra time and I’m feeling almost as let down now as I did when Man U beat Bayern Munich in the European Cup (it isn’t quite that bad). Still, an entertaining start to the tournament with a splendid Greek performance against Portugal yesterday, and I rather fancy the Danes to shock Italy tomorrow.
Endless playing with the BBC score predictor has me anticipating an England—France final with England beating Italy in the semis and France having knocked out the Dutch. But, of course, whatever happens in the real world, it won’t be that. The Dutch are the big mystery, of course, they always screw up in the end (and with Clarence Seedorf threatening to quit if he’s not played in his favourite position, it looks like business as usual). Group C looks the hardest to call: neck and neck between the Swedes and the Danes to avoid relegation [I meant non-qualification, of course]. And I expect the Germans to get just one point, a miserable goalless draw with Latvia. And the final victors? Like everyone else I can’t see beyond France.
[Update: my hot betting tip is Fernando Morientes for top scorer at 20/1]
Some months ago I bought tickets to this Saturday’s performance of The Valkyrie at English National Opera , having failed to notice that it clashed with the last day of the football season . Not only did it clash, but the first act would begin at half-time. So I faced the prospect of sitting through the incestuous romance of Siegmund and Sieglinde whilst in a state of anxiety about the score at Anfield . Happily, thanks to Southampton third-choice goalkeeper Alan Blayney , I can relax and enjoy myself as nothing now hangs on the Liverpool—Newcastle match. Thanks Alan! Now I only have the club selling-out to the Thai Prime Minister to worry about.
I just watched one of the craziest at bats I’ve ever seen in a baseball game. Alex Cora, one of the weakest hitters in baseball, was facing Matt Clement, a pretty good pitcher. After the count ran to 2-1, Cora fouled off 14 consecutive pitches. After the first 7 the commentators were talking about how absurd it was to see all these consecutive foul balls. By 14 they didn’t even have any cliches left. The really surprising thing was that almost all the fouls were close to the lines - hardly any of them went into the stands.
Then on the 18th pitch of the at bat, Alex Cora, in one of the toughest parks to homer in in baseball, hit one into the bullpens beyond right field. Long at bats are fun to watch, but they often end anti-climactically. But Alex Cora hitting a home run, that was a nice ending. I do feel bad for the Cubs fans, because they seem cursed this game, but I’m pretty pleased I got to see something like that.
Dave Podmore is back on Radio 4 on Thursday at 11 pm GMT (that’s 6 pm Eastern Time, Brian). It may be on LISTEN AGAIN, but, then again, it may not (it’s not up yet, anyway). The alert I received said ‘Listen to it - or cop one up the snot box!’ so I’ll be listening if I get home on time….
A chink of hope in an otherwise dismal season as Danny Murphy becomes the first player to score a league penalty for an away team at Old Trafford since 1993.
I’m in Ireland at the moment, on leg #4 of a round-the-world trip. Lead item on the news tonight, and lead story on the news analysis program afterwards, is Corkman and folk-hero Roy Keane’s decision to end the civil war in Irish football and make himself available again for selection to the international team. After reaching the agreement, Keane’s solicitor issued the following statement:
Following discussions with Brian Kerr and Alex Ferguson, Roy Keane has agreed to make himself available for selection international games in the future.
“I tell you I have signed my own death warrant,” Keane did not add.
After watching his team lose three in a row to England, Brian Lara seems to have been inspired to return to his old form. As I write he’s on 361 not out. Now the big question is whether I’ll be able to get any work done today while I see what happens next. The game can be followed here. (This story about Brian Lara and Matthew Hayden probably won’t appeal to everyone but I thought it was touching.)
Despite having lived my entire life in two of the leading basketball countries of the world, there are many things about basketball I still don’t understand. Like, how can a foul you intended to give not be an intentional foul? I suspect that’s one of those odd quirks of the interpretations like the outside strike that we just have to live with. But here’s a more serious question.
Why is it that players are always taken out of the game when they get into foul trouble?
If they stay in the game, the worst thing that can happen is they foul out. And the cost of fouling out is that you have to spend part of the game on the bench. So to avoid the risk of the player spending a chunk of time on the bench, you make them spend a chunk of time on the bench. This doesn’t obviously make sense.
I can think of three possible explanations for this practice, none of them in general very good. (The last explanation might work in a few cases, but I think it’s fairly rare.)
First, minutes at the end of the game are more highly valued than minutes in the middle of the game. So sitting the player down so they can come back at the end is important. The problem is that there’s little evidence I can see that that claim is true. Buckets don’t count more at the end of the game, for instance.
Second, there might be some strategic loss from not having the option of moving the player in or out once they’ve fouled out. But that wouldn’t explain why star players, who would normally play most of the game anyway, sit when they’re in foul trouble. And the strategy coaches actually follow of automatically benching guys when they get in foul trouble seems to lead to just as large a loss of strategic options.
Third, if the player is part of a platoon, where two players rotate in and out of the one spot to each get a reasonable amount of rest, you might not want the other player being forced to cover the last ten or twelve minutes on their own. This one I think does make sense, but only when the players actually are meant to be platooned in this way.
So I think in general coaches would be better off leaving the players in foul trouble in, and telling them to be a bit careful about picking up cheap fouls.
Of course, I’m 11-5 in my selections after day 1 of the tournament, so you might want to ignore everything I have to say about basketball because I clearly still have a lot to learn.
I’ve never understood a lot of the attraction behind game theory. In particular, I’ve never heard a convincing argument for why Nash equilibria should be considered especially interesting. The only argument I know of for choosing your side of a Nas equilibria in a one-shot game involves assuming, while deciding what to do, that the other guy knows what decision you will make. This doesn’t even make sense as an idealisation. There’s a better chance of defending the importance of Nash equilibria in repeated games, and I think this is what evolutionary game theorists make a living from. But even there it doesn’t make a lot of sense. In the most famous game of all, Prisoner’s Dilemma, we know that the best strategy in repeated games is not to choose the equilbrium option, but instead to uphold mutual cooperation for as long as possible.
The only time Nash equilibria even look like being important is in repeated zero-sum games. In that case I can almost understand the argument for choosing an equilibrium option. (At least, I can see why that’s a not altogether ridiculous heuristic.) One of the many benefits of the existence of professional sports is that we get a large sample of repeated zero-sum games. And in one relatively easy to model game, penalty kicks, it turns out players really do act like they are playing their side of the equilibrium position, even in surprising ways.
Testing Mixed Strategy Equilibria When Players Are Heterogeneous: The Case of Penalty Kicks in Soccer (P.A. Chiappori, S. Levitt, T. Groseclose). (paper, tables) (Hat tip: Tangotiger)
Some of you will have seen this before, because it was published in American Economic Review, but I think it will be news to enough people to post here. The results are interesting, but mostly I’m just jealous that those guys got to spend research time talking to footballers and watching game video. I haven’t heard any work that sounded less like research since I heard about that UC Davis prof whose research consists in part of making porn movies.
A pub conversation about the current composition of the English Premier League led me to check the regional distribution of teams at the moment. The best represented region is Lancashire (historic boundaries) with 6 teams, followed by London with 5. The West Midlands has 3, the South of England 2, the North East 2, and the East Midland and Yorkshire one each. All of which raises an issue: if Leeds are relegated and Sheffield United are not promoted, will next season be the first season ever without a Yorkshire team in the top division of English football?
Tim Dunlop encounters U.S. sports commentators at their most excitable:
Over the last few days I’ve heard four radio commentators refer to the Superbowl as the “most important sporting event in the world”. Those exact words.
This is especially true this year with the eagerly-awaited Lingerie Bowl at half-time. Depending on your outlook, the Lingerie Bowl is either (1) A measure of how deeply the Title IX revolution in women’s athletics has penetrated into the football industry, (2) A high-end version of the noble American tradition of powder puff football; or (3) Sadly available only on Pay-Per-View.
Anyway, the most important sporting event in the world is the All Ireland Hurling Final.
The African Cup of Nations kicks off on Saturday with the host nation Tunisia taking on Rwanda. Most of the groups look fairly predictable, with Tunisia set to top A, Senegal B, Cameroon C and Nigeria D. Having said that, if there is a “group of death” then D is it, with Nigeria, Morocco and South Africa all battling it out. I’ll be rooting for Senegal in the hope that El-Hadji Diouf and Salif Diao recapture their form and bring it back to Merseyside (well you never know). What a great sport, where some of the world’s poorest nations are better than some of the wealthier ones.
Chelsea have had a jinx over Liverpool at Stamford Bridge for as long as I can remember. Tonight, with the bookies offering 4/1 against, that jinx was broken by a superb Bruno Cheyrou goal set set up by Emile Heskey and by a great defensive effort from the team. I’m off to have another drink.
Eugene Volokh blogs on an interesting biathlon, involving both chess and boxing, two competitive endeavours that are usually pursued in isolation from each other. There’s some fictional precedent though; the eponymous hero of Maurice Richardson’s The Exploits of Engelbrecht: Abstracted from the Chronicles of the Surrealist Sporting Club proves to be a dab hand at both activities. Engelbrecht is a boxer by profession, and like all Surrealist boxers, he’s a dwarf who fights clocks. Grandfather clocks to be specific (they fight dirty). In a succession of short stories, Engelbrecht also shows his prowess not only in beating clocks to a standstill, but at a variant of chess (in which the pieces are Boy Scouts and nuclear weapons), at kraken wrestling, at pike fishing, at Surrealist golf (the first hole is several thousand miles long), and at Plant Theatre. In my favourite story, Engelbrecht plays in the Earth vs. Mars rugby game; the Earth team is several thousand strong, and features such luminaries as Friedrich Engels, Origen, Nebuchadnezzar, Attila the Hun, the Venerable Bede, Luther, Ethelred the Unready, and Judas Iscariot. Heliogabalus, Bishop Berkeley and Aubrey Beardsley score for Earth; Engelbrecht wins the game at the last moment by cunningly concealing himself inside the ball.
The book came out first in 1950; I’m awaiting delivery of a first edition, and you can’t have it. Sorry. You can however, purchase the Savoy Books edition, which I also own, and which is handsomely illustrated by Ronald Searle among others. You can even browse the first chapter for free on their website. But you should, as they say, read the whole thing. Wonderful stuff.
Normally thinking about either the monarchy or the English rugby team makes me nauseous, but I thought this story was quite amusing.
Scrum-half Matt Dawson revealed that the players had first learned of the invitation as a result of a text the queen sent to her grandson Prince Harry just minutes after Wilkinson’s drop goal clinched their final victory over Australia. Dawson told BBC Radio: “It was quite funny how we found out about it. Harry told us, ‘I’ve just got a text from my nan and she wants to give you a party’.”
By the way, I think if the ‘rules’ for punctuation made any sense there’d be an extra full stop at the end of the last sentence.
Whatever the drawbacks of the Pope’s views about contraception or human sexuality, I was heartened to learn that his judgement remains sound concerning the things that really matter . Now if he could just lay on the odd miracle or two …
A great game — including a great try to boring boring England — and the right result . Commiserations to Brian (England had to beat Australia at something, one day).
Americans, like everyone else, like to play up sporting rivalries. And tomorrow sees the latest installment of one of the big ones by their parochial standards: Ohio State v Michigan. It’s a bit overshadowed though by the greatest rivalry in world sports: Australia v England. Since this time it’s for the Webb Ellis Trophy, it is a pretty important game in the rivalry too. A bit more important than, say, our guy beating their guy at darts. In recent years, Australia has outgunned the English in just about everything, but I fear that doesn’t provide much ground for confidence about tomorrow’s game. I’m pretty confident that Australia will score more tries than the English, and the English will score more field goals than we do. If this was an Australian Rules grand final Jonny Wilkinson would be flattened within the first five minutes. Twice. And that’s assuming he got through the warmups unscathed. Fortunately the game they play in heaven is a little more civilised, even if English tactics are about as much in keeping with the spirit of the game as Bodyline. I’m so excited about it I can hardly sleep, which is a good thing since the only way I’ll make a 4am start time is if I’m still awake.
I’m not keen on national anthems, but I was struck before the England—France semi-final by the constrast between God Save the Queen and the Marseillaise . One a dirge like hymn to hierarchy and submission, the other an upbeat celebration of martial comradeship. There’s no question that
Allons enfants de la Patrie
Le jour de gloire est arrivé
are good lines to be singing before you take the field, even if — as it turned out — it hadn’t.
Chris Brooke has an eloquent and quite persuasive response to my post on whom the English should support at sport. A day of grim faculty meetings has quite robbed me of my wit and ripostefulness, so I can’t dash off a witty riposte to him. But do go read his thoughts.
Who knew such a thing existed? And who would have guessed that if it did exist, it would exist in Belgium?
SynopsisThe Philosophy of Cricket encompasses a series of reflections upon the nature of cricket, its forms of practice, its history and its influence in shaping the human form physically, emotionally and morally. A recurring theme throughout is the interplay between the matter (what the game is) and spirit of cricket (ideals concerning how one plays the game). What are these ideals and how do they impinge upon cricket’s conditions of existence? Furthermore, is cricket’s ratio essendi exhausted by a set of prescriptive laws or does it encompass a broader ethos, a body of conventions and connotations, a history and tradition that bind the game to realities beyond its constitutive boundaries?
I think it was Louise Vigeant from whom I heard about this collection. If so, thanks Louise! If it was someone else, apologies and thanks. (If I was a real journo-blogger I’d have been taking notes at lunch so I wouldn’t have to make these disjunctive acknowledgments.) Here’s the full call for papers.
Submissions criteria
Contributions are accepted from a broad range of philosophical disciplines discussing issues relevant to the game of cricket. Possible themes include, but are certainly not limited to, the aesthetics of cricket; ethics in cricket; cricket and the nature of man; cricket and education; cricket and culture, etc. Topics related to broader philosophical themes, such as the phenomenon of sport in general, may also be accepted provided they are predominantly illustrated with examples from cricket. All submissions must be of a philosophical nature, meet high standards of rigour and display an obvious command of the language and subject matter.
Papers should be between 5000 and 8000 words in length, though longer papers of exceptional quality and focus may also be accepted. No papers should exceed 10000 words in length.
All submissions must be written in (British) English and should follow the MLA standards for footnotes, citations and bibliographical references.
Deadlines
Abstracts are to be received by 27 February 2004. The final deadline for submissions is 30 April 2004.
Contact
Contributions for review may be sent in electronic form to the editor:
Institute of Philosophy
Kardinaal Mercierplein 2
B-3000 Leuven
Belgium
+32 16 326356
+32 16 326311 (f)
UPDATE: Normblog suggests some topics for the collection below. Anyone who wants to write on them should send me their efforts, with appropriate credits to Norm. I think consequential vs deontological approaches to walking might be fun to work out. I think I can will the universalised rule “All batters should walk iff they are playing against Australia or Victoria”, which probably messes up the deontological solution.
Quite a sporting weekend for me: I saw Leicester Tigers beat Wasps 32-22 yesterday, then Wales gave England a scare in the Rugby world cup, then Liverpool were denied a deserved point against the S*** at Anfield when referee Graham Poll lacked the courage to award us a cast-iron penalty. Two wins out of three isn’t bad. but when I weight them by how much I care it is still pretty grim.
The only one of these events I attended in person was the Tigers-Wasps encounter which was thoroughly enjoyable and ended a losing streak for Tigers. Bizarrely, the Zurich Premiership continues whilst the leading players are all at the World Cup with the consequence that the strongest teams become the weakest overnight.
All of which is a prelude to brief comment on which teams the English should support at the Rugby World Cup.
England aren’t too popular among Australians, Celts and other colonial types. Which is fair enough. But the odd thing about England and the English is the somewhat odd policy that some English lefties have of supporting other countries against England. This phenonomenon, akin to Leninist revolutionary defeatism , seems peculiar to the English (French, German and American leftie sporting enthusiasts seem to have no problem about cheering on their home team). This lack of national sporting allegiance is sometimes accompanied by a more wholesale national disindentification where, either attracted by the more romantic nature of the Celtic nations or repelled by postcolonial guilt, people who are plainly acculturated as English seek to identify as “really” something else (on the grounds that this or that ancestor was Irish, Scottish or Welsh).
There’s no right or wrong answer of course, about which team a person should support. So if guilty English lefties want to cheer for others then they’re perfectly entitled to do so (but is their displaced allegiance welcome or irritating to the recipients?). But if I’m right in thinking that postcolonial angst is part of the motivation then that seems doubly misplaced. First, anyone who has read Linda Colley’s Britons knows that the Scots rather than the English occupied the upper echelons of the Imperial high command. Second, it seems to me that the displacement of the Union Jack by the Cross of St George in the hands of English sporting fans represents if not an explicit rejection of Great British colonial nationalism, at least an adaptation to something less jingoistic and aggressive, which is a shift that lefties should welcome. So, for the rest of the Rugby World Cup, I, for one will be cheering for Engerrlland.
That would be the fifth Rugby World Cup of course, which is being played down here in Australia and has, I’ve noticed, generally escaped commentary in the blogosphere. But any game where France walk all over the U.S. can’t expect much love in the strongholds of blogging. Here at CT we have a strong representation from the Six Nations, though I don’t know how many of them (if any) are rugby fans. Here’s an update on what’s happening, including details of how the left-wing solidarity of Crooked Timber might be overwhelmed by the false gods of Nationalism.
Chris, Tom and Micah are English. I know Chris is, anyway. Sincere apologies to Tom and Micah if I’m wrong about them. (Sincere apologies if I’m right, too.) England’s rugby team is very good these days, for several reasons. They pioneered the professionalization of rugby in the northern hemisphere, they have perfected a style of forward play that is difficult to defend against, and they like to have more players than allowed on the pitch whenever they feel they are in danger of losing a match.
I believe Daniel is Welsh. Wales were seeded much too high coming into the tournament, had by far the easiest qualifying group of any of the traditional rugby-playing countries and are still managing to make pretty heavy weather of it. The typical tone of Daniel’s posts may be explained by his being from a once proud rugby-playing nation that has now gone to seed altogether. Interestingly, Wales’s decline as a force in rugby coincides with the refurbishment and expansion of Cardiff Arms Park in the 1990s. A clear case of investment in infrastructure that would have been better spent on human capital.
To my knowledge, no-one at CT is Scottish. Given how they’re playing, that’s probably just as well.
Henry is Irish. So is Maria. And so am I. I never actually played rugby at school, because I’m from the wrong class fraction (there’s a means test). The Farrells are better bred than the Healys so Henry probably did. Anyway, having scraped past Argentina, we’re into the quarter finals. The Pumas made their best effort to stop us, which is to say that they eye-gouged two of our forwards towards the end of the game. Eye-gouging was perfected in Buenos Aires in the 1970s, which shouldn’t surprise anyone.
The general inference is true, by the way: A country’s favored form of illegal play in rugby mirrors the favored pattern of political repression. Argentina’s is all hidden in the scrum, with opposing players found on the ground mysteriously bleeding from the eyes once play has moved on. South Africa are much more up front about things, preferring just to hit you where everyone can see. England, as noted above, invent the rules that everyone must play by (except England).
Maria is Irish but lives in Paris. The French are a great team, capable of quite incredible things, if it’s the right day of the week. Unfortunately, there is no good rule for establishing what the right day of the week is.
Brian is Australian. Australia are the defending champions. Tomorrow, Ireland play them in the final game before the knockout stage starts. If Ireland win, we’ll play Scotland or Fiji in the quarter finals instead of France. Ireland specialise in glorious defeats and moral victories. But we also have a good line in underdog upsets, so I think we’re in with a shot.
Poor IDS. The Tory party conference (like the Women’s World Cup ) has been entirely overshadowed in the British media by the ongoing slimefest that is the English Premier League. Following a mass brawl at the end of a recent Arsenal-Manchester United game, we’ve now been treated to two separate sexual assault allegations (one a gang rape involving players from at least two clubs), various petty acts of violence and verbal abuse, and finally, a leading club allowing one of its players to “forget” to take the drug test he was selected for shortly before. The refusal of the Football Association to select the player for England with investigations pending has led to England players (led by the player’s mates from the same team) to threaten to refuse to play against Turkey. Meanwhile, there have been hints that the England manager has abused his position to tout for a club owned by a Russian oligarch.
This list could be extended considerably to include more episodes involving overpaid young men acting in the belief (usually underwritten by their corporate employers and managers) that their wealth and celebrity exempt them from both the criminal law and sporting regulations.
The Football Association, whose moral authority in relation to the big clubs has hitherto resembled that of a gerbil in a snakepit, seems to be willing to do something at last. That seems to offend many pundits, who have been echoing the players’ mantras of “innocent until proven guilty” and “benefit of the doubt.” Such sentiments would certainly not have been expressed by tabloid journalists had the athlete speeding off in their BMW instead of pissing in a pot been a Dutch cyclist or an Irish swimmer. I don’t expect the FA’s resolve to last, though, and I predict that this latest offender will be dealt with more leniently for failing to take a drug test than an earlier one was for merely joking about cocaine. It almost makes me want to watch rugby instead.
A soccer world cup championship is down to the finals, but you’d be hard-pressed to know it. I’m not surprised that here in Chicagoland it has not been at the forefront of sports headlines. With all the focus on the Cubs there would not be much coverage even if the US had made it to the finals. Alas, it didn’t. It’s down to Sweden and Germany.
It’s been interesting to watch the rise in the popularity of women’s soccer in the US. There are two things standing in its way: one is that it’s a women’s sport, which tends to be less popular overall (although we are seeing some change in that, but not too much) and it’s soccer, which is not exactly the most popular sport in the United States if you judge by media coverage. But it’s not that simple. Soccer is actually quite popular when it comes to participation and going out to see a game [pdf]. It is also a very popular high school sport in the US and many of those participants are girls. So no, it’s not because soccer is somehow inherently un-American that it has not gained popular appeal. I’m sure the fact that it is hard to break the game up into sections to accomodate commercials has to do with it. But I don’t want to get into too much popsociology here. There is a book on this, Offside, which the reviews on Amazon suggest is a good read on the topic. (The reviews will also give you an idea of the argument of the book. I don’t feel comfortable commenting on that since I haven’t read it myself.)
I was at the 1999 World Cup opening game and it was very exciting. This year, most of the games have been broadcast on ESPN2 or even less mainstream channels in the US limiting the size of audiences. I only happened upon the Canada-Sweden game today by accident. Are the games getting better coverage in other countries? The final will be broadcast on ABC so that should reach more people. How many will be watching is another question. I’m planning on throwing a Women’s World Cup Final brunch party to add to the fun.
Simon Kuper has been pretty busy this week. Not content with analyzing the Islamic vote, he also provides a handy compendium of weird animal sports , including elephant polo, goat racing and tortoise racing. Many of these pastimes are products of the British empire it seems. The champion tortoise answers to the name of Rosa Luxemburg.
It’s well known that our intuitive approaches to probabilistic reasoning lead to fairly bizarre beliefs and behaviour in some circumstances. It can also lead to fairly odd attitudes and emotions in the right circumstances. Consider, for example, how it would feel being a fan of the various teams in the American League playoff race.
Baseball Prospectus has introduced a new model calculating the probability of each team reaching the playoffs given their current standings, their performance to date, and their upcoming schedule. I don’t know how good the model is, but let’s assume for now it’s accurate. If so, here’s the probability of each team making the playoffs as of the morning of August 30.
Yankees 91.5%
As 80.0%
Red Sox 73.0%
Mariners 51.7%
White Sox 46.2%
Twins 38.5%
Royals 18.1%
From that report you’d think Mariners fans should be at least as happy about their position as White Sox fans, maybe more so. But I suspect that’s not the case right now, because of the odd way the playoff teams are chosen.
There’s four playoff teams - the winners of the eastern, central and western divisions, and a wildcard for the best second place team. In effect the best three of the Yankees, As, Red Sox and Mariners will go through, two as eastern and western winners and the third as wildcard. And the best of the White Sox, Twins and Royals will go through as winner of the central.
Right now in the four team race for three spots, the Mariners are looking by far the weakest of the four. It’s pretty close, but it’s much easier to see the Mariners missing than any of the other three. It would be hard to feel particularly happy about your position if you’re a Mariners fan, because one of the four has to miss and you’re the most likely one to do so, by far.
The three team race for the central crown is tighter, but the White Sox have the upper hand right now. It would be easy to feel confident if you’re a White Sox fan. One of the three teams has to go through, and it’s most likely going to be you.
It should be clear what went wrong in the reasoning in the last sentence of each of the last two paragraphs. When there are many possible outcomes, you shouldn’t pay as much attention to which of them is most likely as much as to how probable each of them is. If Mariners fans did that they would think “I don’t know who we’re going to finish ahead of, but I’m still confident enough we’ll finish ahead of someone.” And if White Sox fans did that they might think “I don’t know who’s going to beat us, but it’s still a good chance that someone will beat us.” (That might be too depressing - it’s better if you’re a fan to focus on the positive sometimes. It’s possible to be too rational in sports sometimes. So let’s focus on why Mariners fans might be too depressed.)
The fallacy here, assigning too much weight to the most likely outcome, is I think reasonably common. But even once you’ve seen it it’s hard to overcome it. If I were a Mariners fan, I’m not sure I’d find the reassuring speech in the last paragraph that reassuring, even if I could (at some level) recognise the soundness of the reasoning.
Anyone who follows football (or “soccer” to some of you people) knows that English club Chelsea have recently been bought by Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich. On top of the price of the club and wiping out its enormous debts, Abramovich’s spending on players has now exceeded £100 million and a club near bankruptcy when the last season ended has become a serious contender for the championship. Naturally, the response of sporting journalists has not been to ask Michael Walzer-like questions about power in one sphere being translated to another, about the corruption of sporting contests (it was bad enough even beforehand) or about where and how this mysterious Russian got his cash (political leverage with the Yeltsin clan). Rather, they’ve fawned uncritically over this rather repulsive character. (I might add that commentary on the subject at Libertarian Samizdata hasn’t exactly focused on Lockean principles of justice in acquisition or anything similar.)
Now, at least there’s one journalist who has written something decent on the subject: Peter Chapman in the Financial Times:
Abramovich, of course, has chosen Chelsea for no reasons but his own. We can only guess what they are: to get a spare quarter of a billion or so out of Russia that he’d rather have abroad than at home; to establish himself in one of the old centres of western capitalism and win more legitimacy than he can hope for on the system’s wilder Russian frontier; to get himself a pad in west London, his kids a British education….
Who knows? But obviously he shares none of the tribal loyalities for the club felt by those cheering for him, and views it, and them, only as an investment, whether for the purposes of his business, social affairs or ego. Give him a round of welcoming applause, therefore, it’d be only polite to do so. But ease up on the adoration.
What’s going on at Stamford Bridge bears comparison with what social anthropologists identify as a millenarian movement. Such a thing tends to take hold among primitive peoples, though more in the western Pacific than west London, in the strange form of the cargo cult. They imagine that valuable goods - fridges, TVs, silver cups, free subscriptions to Sky - will one day fall down to them from the firmament. They appoint unlikely people as their leaders, like Prince Philip, and worship them.
You’d have thought that Chelsea fans with the capacity to think beyond the next round of drinks would feel there was something not right about all this money that lately has showered down on the club. Can they ever derive very much satisfaction from it? Winning gives fleeting enough pleasure as it is, without the knowledge that you bought the trophy.
There’s also the minor matter of where it came from. Russia’s post-communist carve up of social assets left people like Abramovich very rich but highly unpopular. Some have tried to win favour by philanthropic good works, though large numbers of Russian pensioners scrabbling for their next meal might not see developments at Stamford Bridge in that light. But at least Chelsea have been able to rustle up the £17m needed this week to buy Hernan Crespo, another player they don’t really need.
Well said that man! In the interests of full disclosure I should state, for the record, that my bitterness towards Chelsea and their displacement of Manchester United from the position of club-I-most-dislike is unconnected to the fact that, should they lose today, my own club will have had its worst start to a season since 1911.
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