Saturday, July 24, 2010

inverting the pyramid

As part of the football world cup, I thought I should learn more about football. Most of my football knowledge comes from when I used to occasionally play at school. And that was over 25 years ago.

So I have read "inverting the pyramid" by Jonathan Wilson. The book was about the history of football tactics. The most important thing about tactics is how to partition 10 into integers: 10 = 4:1:3:2 This describes the distribution of players over the pitch. The book showed with examples of how the players were arranged over pitch, changed with time, as football got more sophisticated. I decided that I knew even less about football than I thought I did.

Perhaps the most depressing part of the book was a style of football play sometimes used by the English football team called "kick and rush" was developed by scientific methods. People looked at a sample of football games and counted the number of passes before a goal was scored. The claim seemed to be that only 3 passes were normal before a goal was scored, although there seemed to be some issues about the games included in the sample. So this is why the England football team tend to not favour a lot before attempting to score. of passing "Kick and rush" is widely viewed as a shitty English thing in Europe, but there you go.

I have decided that even though I am not really interested in football, I should be the next manager of the English football team. I would use new tactics based on partioning 10 using real and imaginary numbers. Watch out Germany!