Some months ago I bought tickets to this Saturday’s performance of “The Valkyrie at English National Opera”:http://www.eno.org/whatson/full.php?performancekey=19 , having failed to notice that it clashed with “the last day of the football season”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/eng_prem/fixtures/default.stm . 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”:http://www.liverpoolfc.tv/ . Happily, “thanks to”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/eng_prem/3703591.stm Southampton third-choice goalkeeper “Alan Blayney”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/shared/bsp/hi/football/statistics/teams/s/southampton/players/255787/html/profile_hi.stm , 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”:http://soccernet.espn.go.com/headlinenews?id=300102&cc=5739 to worry about.
From the category archives:
Sport
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”:http://hjem.get2net.dk/mufc/squad/16.htm decision to end the civil war in Irish football and “make himself available again”:http://www.rte.ie/sport/2004/0413/keaneroy.html for selection to the international team. After reaching the agreement, Keane’s solicitor issued the following statement:
bq. Following discussions with “Brian Kerr”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/football/internationals/republic_of_ireland/2697905.stm and “Alex Ferguson”:http://hem.passagen.se/bully/Man_ferguson.html, 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”:http://www.cricinfo.com/db/NEW/LIVE/frames/ENG_WI_T4_10-14APR2004.html. (“This story”:http://theage.com.au/articles/2004/04/12/1081621893367.html?from=storyrhs 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.
“Ireland 19, England 13”:http://www.rte.ie/sport/2004/0306/ireland.html
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.
bq. 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”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/africa/default.stm 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”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/eng_prem/3362519.stm 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”:http://volokh.com/2003_12_07_volokh_archive.html#107107377078741002 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”:http://www.abel.net.uk/~savoy/HTML/engelb.html edition, which I also own, and which is handsomely illustrated by Ronald Searle among others. You can even browse the “first chapter”:http://www.abel.net.uk/~savoy/engel.pdf 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.