Visiting Munich’s other team (TSV 1860 Munich – Karlsruher SC 2:1)

While I was visiting my sister in Munich ver the weekend I took the chance to take the trip to the Allianz Arena, the home ground of Bayern Munich and TSV 1860. Since the First Division of the german Bundesliga is still in its summer break we were watching 1860 take on Karlsruher SC. Not your highlight match, but professional football nonetheless.

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Statistics and Football: (IV) Passes attempted/Passes completed

One of the most frequent statistics in football which is being cited quite regularly in recent times is the number of passes attempted and passes completed. I believe it is meant to show the importance a player has for his own team and how well he sets up his teammates. Players like Xavi or Andres Inieasta always have incredibly high numbers in this department.

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Women’s World Cup 2011: Yet another world cup experience

On Sunday the final of this years edition of the FIFA women’s world cup will come to an end at Frankfurt and what an exciting tournament it had been. There have been surprises, upsets, great plays and a lot of wonderful football. Although you always have to take into account that you should not compare this version of the beautiful game with what we are used to seeing in the big european leagues all year long. The rules are the same, yet it is a different sport. If you manage to let go of certain images and expectations, you will have the time of your life.

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Summer Koshien just around the corner

As Summer gets hotter and August inches closer and closer everybody knows it won’t be long until the high school boys of Japan will play on the sacred dirt of Koshien again. I hope I will be able to catch at least a few games which might be difficult because of my work. But at least there are some articles which are a nice read, especially this series in the New York Times (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3). And, by the way, as if you needed to know, but be sure to bookmark the great blog “Koukou Yakyuu” which will provide you with a live blog for almost every game. Edwin’s doing a great job there (and he’s on Twitter, by the way), just as Westbay-san is with japanesebaseball.com, which will hopefully have its chatroom up and running for the tournament again. I’m really looking forward to this tournament, especially because it will be a very emotional event because of what happened on March 11th. Hopefully the kids can bring some joy to the people in the devastated areas. 皆、頑張って下さい！！

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Statistics and Football: (III) Ball possession

While to me it’s pretty easy to despise something like “shots on goal” it’s a lot harder to get to the bottom of “ball possession”. This actually can tell you something about the flow of the match and the dominace a team might have over its opponent. Still, with this one as well, there are some things I don’t understand at all.

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Statistics and Football: (II) Shots on Goal

Okay, let’s get this started. In the early 1990s the German TV station Sat.1  started showing the weekend games in a show called “ran”. In that show they introduced the so-called “ran database“, a device not specified, but heavily quoted, when they were trying to press football into a strict measure to explain the game to their viewers. This ended up with strange explanations like “Team A hasn’t lost a home game to Team B in the past 15 years” which was easy, because Team A played in Division 1 and Team B in Division 2 over that timespan, so both teams simply haven’t played each other in the past 15 years. While the content of this statement was true, it didn’t explain anything. I find this extremely annoying.

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