Further to the post below, Euro 2004 provides a great deal of similar nonsense with respect to football. Scoring goals, in this case, has a large element of chance. Using our urn analogy helps us understand what's really going on.

Let's label our balls "goal" or "not goal" for each player subject to the rules dscribed below. Most obviously, you'll get more goals by anyone the more draws you make from the urn, i.e. the more times you get a shot on goal. Better teams, however, create not only more shots on goal but shots from places with a higher probability of scoring. We can again envisage a series of urns in which the ratio of the number of balls labeled "goal" to "non-goal" changes, from a low scoring probability (more "non-goal" balls) to high (more "goal" balls). The highest probability urn is an attempt from ten yards or less from directly between the goalposts. Most pro footballers will score at a high % from this position, whatever their position. Creating draws from this urn is very difficult, though and can be made more difficult by skilful defence. The best way to create such opportunities is to beat either full back and pull the ball back from the dead-ball line. This is why good fullbacks are important and why players who can beat fullbacks so valued.

The next most dangerous play for a defence is an attack that breaks through the center of the penalty box. Incidentally, the reason this is not quite as dangerous as a cross from the byline is that the goalie has the play in front of him whereas the cross requires the goalie to switch from watching the cross (to be able to judge the flight) to trying anticipate the actual attempt on goal. It requires tremendous skill to dribble though the center of any defence even with good luck. For those who haven't played organized soccer this is hard to explain but it's basically geometry. Unless a defender is absent or falls down and the goalie is really bad, the forward just runs out of room. Neither of these conditions ever apply at any level of pro soccer. So that leaves sheer skill with a bit of luck. Only the great players ever do this and even they may only do it a few times in a career (they may get foiled by the keeper a number of times). Think Maradonna's 1986 goal against England. To work the ball into the box in the center is only marginally easier, since the offside trap also comes into play. The Swiss goal against France was such a goal. Pundits to the contrary ("the French back line looked vulnerable") the chance of anyone victimizing France again in this way in this tournament are close to zero. As the strike moves away from the box the chances of scoring diminish rapidly. They make great highlight reels but my guess is that maybe 1 in 30 go in.

All of this is by way of pointing out that commentators's obsession with "lax marking" is just laziness. It's an obvious comment to make and it's almost always wrong. One egregious example from yesterday was the commentator who ascribed Zidane's goal to a "breakdown in marking". I don't know how much closer the Swiss player who went up with Zidane could get to him without wearing the same shirt! Plus Zidane headed the ball virtually out of the grasp of the Swiss keeper. Believe it or not, sometimes the forward gets to the ball first! Give Zizou some credit for timing, technique and courage. And it was his turn from the urn.

Good teams don't win by "clinical finishing". They win by creating many high-probability goalscoring events, the probability of which also increases with their ability to create varied opportunities. Alternatively, they stymie their opponents into a barrage of hopeful crosses from forward of the box, long-range shots, free-kicks and corners. Sure goals do get scored from these situations but teams that rely on pulling these balls from the urn don't win championships. (Alas for Albion.)Great goalscorers convert many more of these opportunities than their peers but even they miss more than they convert. Get a tape of Czech-Holland and see how many van Nistelrooy might have scored - and he's as good as they come. The key is not the glamorous "moment of genius" but the accumulation of high-quality chances created by superior players, who may, indeeed, in isolation have a moment in which the luck ran with them that makes you forget the three previous times it didn't. Think Henry, yesterday.

There's a lot of rubbish in the sports media about Tiger Woods in the aftermath of the US Open at Shinnecock. While sports media are paid to "hype", in the belief that controversy increases media purchases, listening and/or viewing, which, in turn increasing adverizing revenues, the commentary on Woods is particularly bad. There is a systematic feature of the coverage of golf by the sports media that is prominent here.

There's a fundamental misconception of the nature of winning at golf which focuses on single events and on individuals with respect to "clutch" performance. This is true of all sports journalism (although preoccupation with "clutch" performance is worst in Baseball. Let's take the "turning point" obsession. Which shot of Goosen's "won" him the US Open? Clearly the answer is "none of them". He won by hitting 278 golf shots to Mickelson's 280. ALL OF THOSE STROKES COUNTED, FOLKS! True Mickelson 3-putt the 17th in tht last round but I'm sure he one-putt some greens, too. The 17th seems significant because of the drama of the last few holes but that drama would have been absent had Mickelson not holed an awful lot of putts before then.

What's the key point here? Like all sports golf has a random element. At the level of play of tour pros chance determines the outcome of x% of tournaments, where x is very difficult to figure out but my guess is in the vicinity of 50%. The remaining determinants are the relative strengths of the all-round game of the strongest players. Think of the PGA tour as the urn beloved of statistics texts. Balls representing the 200 or so players are put into the urn each week and one of them is drawn as the winner. If the balls were identical and the selection process unbiased the winners would follow closely a uniform distribution, with equal probabilities of a win for each player. However, in a year there are only 30 or so draws plus the week-to-week composition of the draw changes. While over a ten year period, if the draw composition were fixed, we would expect wins to equalize over all players, in each year we would expect, by chance alone, some apparent anomalies, such as one player winning three or more times, possibly in closely adjacent draws.

The phrase "at the level of play" is emphasized for two reasons:(1) the "balls" are not all the same, some players do have better games than others; and, (2) golf pros are on a completely different level than 999.9% of people who play golf. Taking the second point first, pressure is a huge factor for you and I but it isn't for tour pros. They wouldn't be there if they weren't all able to handle pressure. The way they handle pressure is all the same: they have techniques that are so well-honed that they have extruded the effect of nerves that keep everyone else off the tour. This is not to cavil at their mental strength, but no more so than their superior techniques in the wide variety of strokes that a pro must have in their repertoire. The first point brings us back to Tiger.

Tiger is just better than the others. Just as Nicklaus was. Els is not as good as Tiger but better than everyone else, Singh is not as good a Els but ...and so on. How much better Tiger is compared to Nicklaus is the extended experiment that we're seeing played out. Whether either or both are "Bradman Class" is good issue for debate. What is not debatable is that both are or were much better than everyone else. This is reflected very clearly in their performace records: they finished in the top ten mcuh more often than their contemporaries and if you keep adding your "ball" to that smaller urn, yopur going to get drawn as winner more often. Incidentally, Nicklaus has always said this, in non geek-speak; go back and check how many times he's been quoted as saying that to win tournaments you have to be on the leaderboard on the last day "to give yourself a chance to win". Easier said than done! Unless you're as good as Jack, which no-one has been until Woods. What we saw with Woods in his early years was partly a measure of his superiority and partly chance. We don't know how much to attribute to skill and to chance. We can say this: winning 7 of 11 majors in a stretch was an incomparable achievement. Whether chance will stretch out his "drought" to 9, 10,11 we don't know; the balls will keep going in the urns and the one labelled "T" will get its draws. Irrespective of what Butch Harmon says.

Word has leaked out that Lance Armstrong is being accused of using “illegal” drugs. Does anyone believe any more that any elite athletes don’t use drugs? The entire athletics world – I include cycling – has become a complete farce. Unfortunately, the farce is spreading slowly to major pro sports, too. It’s now simply a contest of testing labs and those who devise ways to confound the testing, a spiral that will always favor the confounders. Unfortunately, it’s money for a lot of people. Those who’ve made their careers out of pious posturing – step forward, Dick Pound, the testing labs and consultants, the drug testing bureaucracies, and, the drug makers. The confounders have upper hand for two reasons: testing protocols can never be water-tight; and, more decisively, you can only test for what you know and it’s much easier to slightly modify a chemical than to characterize, reclassify and test for the new chemical. In any event, Armstrong’s achievement is in no way diminished in my mind, at least. With the chemical assault his body has withstood to hold cancer at bay (i.e. chemotherapy) the technique(s) he may have used to compete with everyone else are chickenfeed.

No-one ever breathed a word of performance-enhancing substances for “Braddles”.

England’s recent loss to France in Euro 2004 raises interesting issues about the meaning of “World Class” and, beyond that, of “Bradman Class”.

My view is that football (soccer) has not produced a Bradman. There are a number of players who were or are markedly better than most other players and good arguments may be made for against their relative “greatness”; Pele, di Stefano, Puskas, Best, Matthews, Cruyff, Beckenbauer, Maradonna, Bobby Charlton, Matthaeus and Platini, among others, are retired players who fall into this category. There is a much broader category that might usefully be called “World Class” and current players who would be included in this class without much argument would be, e.g. Beckham, Zidane, Figo, Henry, Owen, Totti, Maldini, Nedved, van Nistelrooy, Kluivert, Raul and quite a few others.

England’s failure to win a major trophy since 1966, I believe, turns on the failure to produce enough World Class players.

Why are such players so important in this quintessential team game? Simply because the standards at the international level are so high. Just about everyone on any pitch in any game can “play”. In particular, defensive players are so good (I include defensive midfielders) that much of any match may be thought of as a chess game, albeit amongst “pieces” of tremendous technical physical skill. The outcome of games, then, do tend to depend on either mistakes or moments of unexpected brilliance or both. This is the difference that “World Class” makes, either in correcting or extinguishing mistakes or creating opportunities or capitalizing on mistakes.

To illustrate this, compare the current England team to the benchmark, the 1966 squad. In my view, that team had the unusual feature of three players who were not only “World Class” but “high end” World Class, i.e. arguably among the “greats”. One I have mentioned, Bobby Charlton; the other two are Banks, the ‘keeper, and Moore, a defensive midfielder who was almost as good as Beckenbauer. I yield to few my admiration for the defence of that team – Wilson (my favourite defensive fullback of any), Jack Charlton and Cohen – but England has always had good or even great defenders. Yesterday’s back four – Neville, King, Campbell and Cole – played magnificently and are generally comparable. (Jack Charlton has always been a favorite of mine – I think he’s very underrated – but Campbell is truly superb, perhaps the best pure defensive player in the World right now and King showed he belongs at this level). However, there is no Moore. The midfields, other than Bobby Charlton, are likewise comparable – Stiles, Ball and Peters versus Lampard, Gerrard, Scholes and Beckham and at striker it’s close, too – Hurst and Hunt against Owen and Rooney.

Substitution makes a difference, too but not such a big one. The key differences are Banks, Moore and Bobby Charlton. Let’s go a little further and compare Charlton and Beckham. Without reiterating points made in earlier posts, Beckham is a “low-end” World player; aside from his (admittedly superior) deadball and right-wing crossing, he’s fairly pedestrian. Bobby C was the complete package, with both feet. Beckham tackles better but Bobby was equally tireless and, in my view, a superior positional player on defence. Moore is harder to classify; he made his own role, like Beckenbauer. It’s not fair to compare King or his likely sub, Terry. Moore was a consummate defender. He was, bar none, the best pure tackler I’ve ever seen, as near to perfection as is humanly possible. Part of this stemmed from his legendary “reading” of the play, part from strength and determination, part from peerless technique. Yet he was more than that; with Moore defence was the foundation for attack. Whether it was simply ultra-cool controlled transition with short passes or carrying the ball or a rapier long-ball (like the one that set up Hurst’s third goal in the Final), he added a dimension that England have lacked ever since. In addition, in his prime, he simply didn’t make mistakes; more than that he cleaned up for others. I would hazard that the only mistake he made wearing an England shirt was in one of his final games; he allowed Lubanski to dispossess him, which led to the great Polish forward scoring.

In a previous post I’ve rhapsodized about Banks. Let me just emphasize here his steadiness. In addition to his acrobatics and his command of the box, he just didn’t let the side down with errors.

So, to get specific, would Banks have saved Zidane’s free-kick? Would Moore have read and snuffed out Gerrard’s faulty back-pass? If he hadn’t would Banks have avoided giving up a penalty? Obviously, we don’t know. Football just doesn’t work that way. What we do know is that having the presence of players like Banks, Moore and Bobby Charlton over the course of several matches, lifts their team to another level. A level, alas, that will not reached by the current one.

To a degree, let me say that Rooney epitomizes England’s problem. He’s almost good enough. He has skill and speed and determination but he’s too much of the “blood and guts” heritage of England. I cringe slightly as I say this; wholehearted toughness is an English virtue, not vice, but it doesn’t carry the day at this level of play. In contrast, Owen is the “real thing” but he’s stymied by unimaginative service. This isn’t to knock Gerrard, Lampard, Scholes, Butt, Hargreaves, etc.. They’re as good as most of their counterparts but they’re not Zidane or Figo or Nedved.

In the end, yesterday’s game, while this a gross simplification, did personify the difference between Beckham – a low-end World Class – and Zidane, who will surely join Platini in the exalted category, even though he’s clearly on the wane. Paranthetically, France is going to have get more creative if it’s going to win the championship again. Give credit to England’s excellent defensive work, but there were too many useless crosses from forward of the box, too little of Henry and Pires taking on Neville and Cole, respectively, to pull back dangerous crosses.

To compare Henry, the best player in the World right now, with a true “great” – a possible contender for Bradman class – let’s recall that Stan Matthews faced the same challenge and never backed away. What did Matthews do when faced with massed defences? Two things. First, the same. He knew that only one defender at once can face you as go for the byline to cross the ball; more than one just get in each other’s way. He had the supreme confidence that he could make that jink, beat whoever was marking him and get in the cross. Second, different. If he got the ball too far from the box he would draw the crowd and pass the ball off, stranding at least one marker. So he did rely on service. You could keep him quiet by choking off passes that let his get into “his” territory, right side of the box 20 yards out but it came at a cost – gaps elsewhere for lesser players to exploit. Henry has the pace and the skill. Does he have the savvy and the fortitude?

The phrase “gaps elsewhere for lesser players” brings us full circle. This is why the exceptional players are needed to create champions at the international level. It’s the accumulation of flashes of brilliance or creation of opportunities that makes all the difference at the attacking end and the snuffing out of the same by exceptional defending and goalkeeping at the defensive end.