Nothing to do with the OP, but does anyone anywhere discuss soccer formations? Does anything about soccer have intricacy?
I once asked an Englishman about zonal marking, which I think is what American football calls a zone defense. He hadn’t heard of either. Which was strange because he professed to be a huge fan of soccer and he was excited that England was going to be playing a big game against some other country that night. I should add that he had a Ph.D., in history, and he was definitely smart. He taught the course I took on the Mexican Revolution a few summers ago. Like the best scholars, he was full of vignettes, telling details, and wry observations, as well as being able to give, at any scale from sentence to paragraph to seminar, a rundown of his chosen subject. I never had much understood Mexico’s history or much apprehended its geography; I also hadn’t ever heard the Rurales described as a “chocolate-box police force.” Very impressive. But as I say, the guy had a most uninformed view of the sport he cherished. I guess he just liked all that running-around, which is what it has always looked like to me.
I might also add that he was a naturalized U.S. citizen, though he didn’t seem to know much about this country. I wanted to ask him, “Was Mexico full?” But I held my tongue. Anyway, back to the tedious delta streams of playoff baseball, the overlong antecedents to the Fall Classic! Maybe we’ll get to that before the snow flies!
Yes, everything looks uncomlicated when you know nothing about it, as I don't about Baseball.
Soccer is a very tactical game. The formation you choose for your team and which may need to be adapted if it becomes clear that the other side has an advantage, say, in midfield. You may decide to double up defense on an especially tricky opposition player; you have to decide whether to use wing-backs, or defend deep (which puts the opposition nearer your goal and never in danger of being caught offside) or hold a high defensive line, which is dangerous against a speedy striker who can outrun your big lumbering defenders in a footrace (they have to be big and strong to win balls in the air). You can pack the defense if a draw is all you are after, play very direct out of defense if you have a big centre forward who can hold the ball up while you stream out from the back. Such a tactic is a good way to quickly relieve pressure on a defense and requires little skill.
At corners you can choose to man-mark (hard to keep tabs with an opponent who won't keep still) or mark zonally which risks someone ghosting in unchallenged to one of the gaps you have inevitably left in the penalty area.
So no, soccer is not just 22 blokes running around like headless chickens, though some amateur soccer, some games from 50 years ago and some women's games can often appear so. And yes, pundits endlessly discuss tactics. Some sports writers are very knowledgeable while some ex-players-cum-pundits are much less so and just use buzz words they only half understand.
EPL and the like sports commentary is much more like NBA coverage in that it is a discussion of personalities. Compare that to American football and the discussion of the tush push in the NFL versus using the wildcat or RPO on goal line plays in college.
I can't watch "the show" since I got interested in the College World Series back in the 80's. The games are time limited to an hour, and move FAST. We could catch most of a game during lunch at the pub around the corner from where I worked. I don't know if our productivity was affected for that week but it turned me into a fan of a game I hardly knew existed.
In the Teens, there were several free streaming and broadcast subchannels that shortened the recording of various lower-tier-college sports to fit a time. My elderly dad watched for hours, thankfully with the sound off usually, as announcers don't allow dead air, but every channel was eventually taken over by sports talk. BLEUH!
When the Reds jumped out to their early 2-0 lead, was some small part of you happy because it looked like there may have been a game in Dodger Stadium today? For those who don't follow closely, the Dodgers took their lead in the bottom of the 4th 3-2 and ending up cruising to an 8-4 victory.
For baseball fans elsewhere, rather than have a hole in the primetime schedule MLB has decided to push back the start times of today's 3 hours, so they will be at 3, 5, and 8 instead of the original 1, 4, and 6. Personally I would have gone with 1, 4:30, and 8, but with ABC being promised one of the games I think they wanted to keep one of them at 3.
One minor benefit of living on the east coast is that I never have to do time-zone conversions; all sporting events give their time as Eastern and then perhaps give it parenthetically in local time. This is true even when the games are in Chicago and Los Angeles.
The sad part is that once upon a time you would still have a physical unused ticket as memorabilia but with e-ticketing this is no longer a thing. I was going to say it would have been valuable, but a ticket to the unplayed Game 7 of the 2009 World Series at Yankee Stadium against the Phillies could be bought for $12.95*, even though the original ticket was $80 + $3 tax.
Also, since the playoffs expanded to 8 teams the Reds have qualified for the playoffs 6 times and have only advanced once in that very first year of 1995. This 30-year stretch of futility is by far the longest in major North American sports; the Miami Dolphins haven't won a playoff game since 2000 while in baseball the team closest to the Reds is the Chicago White Sox who haven't won a post-season series since Pope Leo saw them win the World Series 20 years ago
Quite the dilemma! I haven't made up my mind about the higher-seeded team having all three games at home; it seems unfair, especially given that they could have had equal records, but the compression of three games into three days (when the third is played) is good.
EPL and the like sports commentary is much more like NBA coverage in that it is a discussion of personalities. Compare that to American football and the discussion of the tush push versus using the wildcat or RPO on goal line plays in college.
Go ahead and turn the screw the week the Mets bail from the wildcard. At least grandpa is dead. He had a thing against the Dodgers. You know, the thing.
And at least it wasn't real bail.
Enjoy the rest of your season. My rally hat is packed away, and some crappy HVAC company left a big hole in my wall under a porch, and a bobcat got in. I'll be crawling in slimy possum bones pulling out ductwork for the rest of the week. At least I have two great subcontractors. Worth their weight in gold, are good subcontractors. I might kidnap these two.
My grandpa was a very gentle man about everything except the Dodgers and tomatoes. My earliest memories are sitting on his lap on his wheelchair as he pinched a tomato stem for me to smell it, and teaching me to say something unrepeatably pejorative about the Dodgers.
He bought a tomato farm in 1965. Every week, the mob made him pay half his salary for the privilege to keep working as a plumber in Bed Sty. The day they let him go, he celebrated, had a stroke, and never walked or talked again.
I bought a farm in North Georgia. Bad idea, soil-wise. I called it Sicilian Hillbilly after getting permission from the country folk I knew so I wouldn't insult them. I grew 1,000 Black Cherokees the first year. Bastard deer ate them. I also testified in federal court to put Dominick dePaolo (real name) of ILGPNWU in prison for a RICO charge for stealing hundreds of dollars from my paychecks. Local Union #1 in NYC, though they spread out around the South. Sure they got me fired and slashed my tires, but Mr. Luke, the old guy who fixed cop cars, wouldn't charge me a dime to tow and replace them as long as I hung out and helped him open scores of cat food cans for his multiplying (I think there's a more accurate word for this) kittens and watch soap operas with him.
Sometimes the universe does give back, doesn't it. But, the Dodgers?
I saw my first game at the Coliseum in 1959. In my day, making honor roll in high school earned you single tickets to four (4) different games. A buddy and I took a bus from Torrance to downtown and walked to the Stadium to see Bill Singer’s no-hitter against the Phillies. Oh, how great it would be to see a repeat this weekend.
That first inning wasn’t exactly confidence-boosting.
I wonder if Yamamoto swears in English or Japanese?
The way some women must feel when they overhear men discussing the intricacies of the 4-4-2 system in soccer is how I feel about all of baseball talk.
Nothing to do with the OP, but does anyone anywhere discuss soccer formations? Does anything about soccer have intricacy?
I once asked an Englishman about zonal marking, which I think is what American football calls a zone defense. He hadn’t heard of either. Which was strange because he professed to be a huge fan of soccer and he was excited that England was going to be playing a big game against some other country that night. I should add that he had a Ph.D., in history, and he was definitely smart. He taught the course I took on the Mexican Revolution a few summers ago. Like the best scholars, he was full of vignettes, telling details, and wry observations, as well as being able to give, at any scale from sentence to paragraph to seminar, a rundown of his chosen subject. I never had much understood Mexico’s history or much apprehended its geography; I also hadn’t ever heard the Rurales described as a “chocolate-box police force.” Very impressive. But as I say, the guy had a most uninformed view of the sport he cherished. I guess he just liked all that running-around, which is what it has always looked like to me.
I might also add that he was a naturalized U.S. citizen, though he didn’t seem to know much about this country. I wanted to ask him, “Was Mexico full?” But I held my tongue. Anyway, back to the tedious delta streams of playoff baseball, the overlong antecedents to the Fall Classic! Maybe we’ll get to that before the snow flies!
Yes, everything looks uncomlicated when you know nothing about it, as I don't about Baseball.
Soccer is a very tactical game. The formation you choose for your team and which may need to be adapted if it becomes clear that the other side has an advantage, say, in midfield. You may decide to double up defense on an especially tricky opposition player; you have to decide whether to use wing-backs, or defend deep (which puts the opposition nearer your goal and never in danger of being caught offside) or hold a high defensive line, which is dangerous against a speedy striker who can outrun your big lumbering defenders in a footrace (they have to be big and strong to win balls in the air). You can pack the defense if a draw is all you are after, play very direct out of defense if you have a big centre forward who can hold the ball up while you stream out from the back. Such a tactic is a good way to quickly relieve pressure on a defense and requires little skill.
At corners you can choose to man-mark (hard to keep tabs with an opponent who won't keep still) or mark zonally which risks someone ghosting in unchallenged to one of the gaps you have inevitably left in the penalty area.
So no, soccer is not just 22 blokes running around like headless chickens, though some amateur soccer, some games from 50 years ago and some women's games can often appear so. And yes, pundits endlessly discuss tactics. Some sports writers are very knowledgeable while some ex-players-cum-pundits are much less so and just use buzz words they only half understand.
EPL and the like sports commentary is much more like NBA coverage in that it is a discussion of personalities. Compare that to American football and the discussion of the tush push in the NFL versus using the wildcat or RPO on goal line plays in college.
I don't know what any of that means.
Maybe your friend can get tickets and take you to a LA vs PHIL NLDS game.
Does a season ticket include any playoffs, or do they just get first dibs?
The latter, in my experience.
I can't watch "the show" since I got interested in the College World Series back in the 80's. The games are time limited to an hour, and move FAST. We could catch most of a game during lunch at the pub around the corner from where I worked. I don't know if our productivity was affected for that week but it turned me into a fan of a game I hardly knew existed.
> The games are time limited to an hour
I don't think that's a true statement
That was 40 years ago. Things may have changed, an hour might be a false memory, but they were time limited and quite fast.
1970 CWS, 15-inning game between Florida State and USC. Of course, for the final 6 innings they went to the spelling bee.
In the Teens, there were several free streaming and broadcast subchannels that shortened the recording of various lower-tier-college sports to fit a time. My elderly dad watched for hours, thankfully with the sound off usually, as announcers don't allow dead air, but every channel was eventually taken over by sports talk. BLEUH!
Yup, the next day's condensed 'Sox in Two' on Channel 38 was my go-to.
The big10 channel shows recorded games of football in an hour.
Notre Dame started that in the 70s. Lindsey Nelson would say “moving along to further action in the second quarter….”
When the Reds jumped out to their early 2-0 lead, was some small part of you happy because it looked like there may have been a game in Dodger Stadium today? For those who don't follow closely, the Dodgers took their lead in the bottom of the 4th 3-2 and ending up cruising to an 8-4 victory.
For baseball fans elsewhere, rather than have a hole in the primetime schedule MLB has decided to push back the start times of today's 3 hours, so they will be at 3, 5, and 8 instead of the original 1, 4, and 6. Personally I would have gone with 1, 4:30, and 8, but with ABC being promised one of the games I think they wanted to keep one of them at 3.
One minor benefit of living on the east coast is that I never have to do time-zone conversions; all sporting events give their time as Eastern and then perhaps give it parenthetically in local time. This is true even when the games are in Chicago and Los Angeles.
> I had a ticket for a baseball playoff game
The sad part is that once upon a time you would still have a physical unused ticket as memorabilia but with e-ticketing this is no longer a thing. I was going to say it would have been valuable, but a ticket to the unplayed Game 7 of the 2009 World Series at Yankee Stadium against the Phillies could be bought for $12.95*, even though the original ticket was $80 + $3 tax.
Also, since the playoffs expanded to 8 teams the Reds have qualified for the playoffs 6 times and have only advanced once in that very first year of 1995. This 30-year stretch of futility is by far the longest in major North American sports; the Miami Dolphins haven't won a playoff game since 2000 while in baseball the team closest to the Reds is the Chicago White Sox who haven't won a post-season series since Pope Leo saw them win the World Series 20 years ago
* https://ebay.us/m/lK6f5h
We should have statistics based on papacies.
Quite the dilemma! I haven't made up my mind about the higher-seeded team having all three games at home; it seems unfair, especially given that they could have had equal records, but the compression of three games into three days (when the third is played) is good.
It's the Climate Weenies!
You've perfectly articulated the fan's interior monologue about a playoff rooting interest dilemma. (I'd offer you a playoff ticket if I had any).
EPL and the like sports commentary is much more like NBA coverage in that it is a discussion of personalities. Compare that to American football and the discussion of the tush push versus using the wildcat or RPO on goal line plays in college.
Go ahead and turn the screw the week the Mets bail from the wildcard. At least grandpa is dead. He had a thing against the Dodgers. You know, the thing.
And at least it wasn't real bail.
Enjoy the rest of your season. My rally hat is packed away, and some crappy HVAC company left a big hole in my wall under a porch, and a bobcat got in. I'll be crawling in slimy possum bones pulling out ductwork for the rest of the week. At least I have two great subcontractors. Worth their weight in gold, are good subcontractors. I might kidnap these two.
My grandpa was a very gentle man about everything except the Dodgers and tomatoes. My earliest memories are sitting on his lap on his wheelchair as he pinched a tomato stem for me to smell it, and teaching me to say something unrepeatably pejorative about the Dodgers.
He bought a tomato farm in 1965. Every week, the mob made him pay half his salary for the privilege to keep working as a plumber in Bed Sty. The day they let him go, he celebrated, had a stroke, and never walked or talked again.
I bought a farm in North Georgia. Bad idea, soil-wise. I called it Sicilian Hillbilly after getting permission from the country folk I knew so I wouldn't insult them. I grew 1,000 Black Cherokees the first year. Bastard deer ate them. I also testified in federal court to put Dominick dePaolo (real name) of ILGPNWU in prison for a RICO charge for stealing hundreds of dollars from my paychecks. Local Union #1 in NYC, though they spread out around the South. Sure they got me fired and slashed my tires, but Mr. Luke, the old guy who fixed cop cars, wouldn't charge me a dime to tow and replace them as long as I hung out and helped him open scores of cat food cans for his multiplying (I think there's a more accurate word for this) kittens and watch soap operas with him.
Sometimes the universe does give back, doesn't it. But, the Dodgers?
I saw my first game at the Coliseum in 1959. In my day, making honor roll in high school earned you single tickets to four (4) different games. A buddy and I took a bus from Torrance to downtown and walked to the Stadium to see Bill Singer’s no-hitter against the Phillies. Oh, how great it would be to see a repeat this weekend.