Soccer Shout
A weekly football round-up in the fans' own voice.
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RTG: Rethinking The Shootout (Part 5)
Rethinking The Game (RTG) is a series of blog posts on changing minor aspects of the game of football. You may wish to read the introduction to the series if you missed it. ====== In the last post I described why penalty shootouts defy the expectation that the better team will enjoy the advantage ...
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RTG: Rethinking The Shootout (Part 4)
Rethinking The Game (RTG) is a series of blog posts on changing minor aspects of the game of football. You may wish to read the introduction to the series if you missed it. ====== The story so far: Penalty shootouts are random. Utterly random. And random tie-breakers cause problems, the two bigg ...
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RTG: Rethinking The Shootout - Roberto Baggio
By an amazing coincidence, yesterday (July 17th) was the anniversary of Roberto Baggios penalty miss in the final of the 1994 World Cup. Says Baggio in his autobiography: Looking back I have to say that losing a World Cup final on penalties is something that Ill never agree with. If you lose on th ...
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RTG: Rethinking The Shootout (Part 3)
Rethinking The Game (RTG) is a series of blog posts on changing minor aspects of the game of football. You may wish to read the introduction to the series if you missed it. ====== The first part of this series introduced the basic problem with penalty shootouts - that they are essentially random t ...
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RTG: Rethinking The Shootout (Part 2)
Rethinking The Game (RTG) is a series of blog posts on changing minor aspects of the game of football. You may wish to read the introduction to the series if you missed it. ====== In part 1 of Rethinking the Shootout, we suggested that penalties are crapshoot. It may look like football, but its ...
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Free Travel Guide for Premier League Fans
The Gaffer over at EPLTalk.com has just published a free ebook for overseas fans who may be thinking about traving to England to see some football. The book is titled In Pursuit Of Real Football: The Soccer Fans Ultimate Travel Guide To Attending EPL Matches In England. Ive not had a chance to read ...
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RTG: Rethinking The Shootout (Part 1)
Rethinking The Game (RTG) is a series of blog posts on changing minor aspects of the game of football. You may wish to read the introduction to the series if you missed it. ====== Some of the most memorable moments in recent football history have occurred during the penalty shootout. Who can forg ...
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Rethinking The Game - Introduction
The great thing about football is that its rules have survived unchanged for over a century now. If your great-great-grandfather was transported from the terraces of an early-1900s football match to one of todays Premier League grounds, while he would be taken aback by his surroundings, he would fi ...
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Should the Premier League Consider a Draft?
Theres an interesting piece of news breaking that UEFA is petitioning the EU to prohibit transfers of players until they are 18. It sounds like the recommendation is that a players signs schoolboy forms with a club, and will be prevented from leaving until they turn 18. This seems like a knee-jerk ...
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How the Big-4 Benefit from TV Appearances
Sky and Setanta announced their fixtures for the first 15 match days in the 2008 Premier League calendar (here is a Premier League TV Guide for US television). What often goes unnoticed by football fans is the power that the television companies have over which clubs their money goes to. The Premi ...
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Football Slaves? Its Called a Non-Compete Agreement
I had lunch a couple of months ago with a recruiter who I had become friendly with at work. She was leaving her job with her firm and going to work for a rival. At the end of the lunch I promised Id call her if I had any openings in my team that she might help fill. Sorry, she said, I wont be back ...
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Everton Will Give New Stadium Profits to Mortgage Company
The Guardian report today that Everton require loans totaling £78m in order to fund their new stadium at Kirkby. With a bit of math and a few assumptions, we can guess that the Toffees will be giving the proceeds from 14,000 paying fans, every game for the next 25 years. Given that the new stadium ...
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The Tampa Tribune Gets It
Dateline: Tampa, Fl, July 1st 2008. Its the evening in the newsroom of the Tampa Tribune, a major regional newspaper with a circulation of 225,000. Most of the staff are assembled for the gut wrenching discussion of layoffs. All the seats are filled, with many others standing or sitting on desks. ...
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New Name, Same Bad Smell
Whats in a name? that which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet; (Romeo & Juliet, act 2) Shakespeare had it dead right four hundred years ago - changing the name of something wont make it smell any better, and it wont mask a bad stench either. The UEFA Cup has been systematical ...
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Broadway or Hollywood?
There was a time in the past that theater was all the rage. Fame and fortune went hand-in-hand with a starring role on the stage. The stars traveled the world and dined with kings and queens. Of course, this rarely happens anymore. Centuries of tradition have been swept aside by the irrepressible ...
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Are we on a break?
Just a quick note to say Im going to jump back in the blogging saddle. I took some time out from the blog to try and write the book. I did get several chapters finished (maybe 25% complete). But then I got stuckmostly because of time rather than inspiration. Faced with the choice of watching foo ...
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Its Not Leaking (Would You Like To See The Study?)
I was watching the season finale of 30 Rock last week. Jack takes a job with the Bush administration. He gets to his office on the first day to find an overhead water pipe leaking onto his desk. When he mentions the leaking pipe to his long-serving office-mate, hes told No, its not [leaking]. Wev ...
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Football as 24?, Part 2
Would you get hooked on 24 if you could only watch every third episode? Dont worry, its not as bad as it sounds. Youll be able to read newspaper accounts of what happened in the episode, and youll see 2 minutes of highlights on the TV, so its not like youre going to miss anything. Thats what its li ...
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Football as 24?, Part 1
The majority of Premier League clubs have already wrapped up the loose ends of their season. No more cups to play for. Cant be relegated - or cant stay up. Done and done. Just one problem: there are still five games left. If this was the TV series 24, the Jack would have caught the bad guys, defu ...
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The Problem with Thursday
Being a millionaire at a Billionaires Convention is probably a pretty lousy experience. So is being a very attractive lady at a party full of supermodels. Or a brighter-than-average student surrounded by Ph.Ds. The semi-finals of the UEFA Cup should be pretty exciting. Both ties are nicely balanc ...
Soccer Shout
