It’s Man City we are talking of here. One of the most incompetently run clubs in British football for the past few decades. If City’s incompetency doesn’t stop them winning the CL then their curse shall.
Very exciting game between Arsenal and West Ham today, only marred by the fact that the officiating crew seemed to be doing everything possible to ensure a Gunners win.
In the first half West Ham had a goal disallowed for offside, with the replay showing a clearly incorrect call by the assistant referee.
Then, in the second half, Andy Carroll caught Gabriel in possession at the back and looked like he was about to go past him into open space, but Gabriel brought him down. The referee, though, called a foul on Carroll. Not only that, but Gabriel actually kicked out at Carroll in retribution without drawing even a warning.
Carroll was great, with a hat-trick of goals, and West Ham looked the better team for much of the match.
The old Man City that everyone loved: Alan Ball telling the players to take it in the corner to run the time down at 1-1, not realising they needed a win to stay up…
City fans always used to have a great sense of humour, but it seems these days more of them have that United sense of entitlement.
That said, a few years back, Spurs were three nil up against a ten man City (Joey Barton, obviously) at half time and contrived to lose 4-3, so we’ve got plenty of experience in bollocksing it up.
So, when was the last time that a team which was clearly not one of the four best teams in the league did as well as Leicester is doing? I know that the surprise of them is the real story that everyone is focusing on, but watching them play and how they are winning games they are clearly less good than Spurs, Arsenal, Man City, Chelsea,Liverpool and probably West Ham. But damned if they don’t keep winning. That has to be pretty unusual right?
Bolding mine. :dubious:
Honestly, they are a great counter-attacking side with a rock-solid defence. They’ve only conceded a handful of goals since Christmas.
They’re very effective at the way they play; they’ve been largely injury free; they’ve had no real cup commitments; they’ve got a great striker, a couple of very good midfielders, a solid defence and a decent keeper.
And a great team spirit.
A bit like us, really… (apart from the Europa Cup)
If you eliminate the team shutting down in protest of Jose being a dick they Chelsea been really good. And it’s not that Leicester are bad, they are very good, they are just not great and I think noticeably less good than several teams who have had worse luck.
It appears that Leicester cheated the Championship’s FFP rules:
Basically in response to rules put in place in the Championship to reduce debt held by clubs, Leicester, which was being sponsored by King Power, decided to use a “third party” to sell sponsorship rights which was won by… King Power! For 10mil pounds more than their original deal. Now, why is this important? Because under the Championship FFP rules, owners paying more than market value to clubs for sponsorships wouldn’t be counted in calculating how much debt they had. But if a third party found a sponsor… that was seen as ‘market value’.
Though, the Premier League has NO FFP rules, and therefore Leicester appear to escape sanction. And to avoid UEFA Champions League FFP rules, they can merely sell the sponsorship rights for real this time - and as Champions of the league, their fair market value is likely going to be much higher.
Of course, this is more an indictment of FFP, IMO, than Leicester, even though they did break the rules while in the Championship.
Leicester has been trailing for 47 out of the last 2000 minutes they’ve played. I can’t see how you can call any of those teams clearly better than that.
Yep.
Any claim that Leicester isn’t as good as the other teams seems to rest more on reputation and expectations than on their actual performance. “Leicester is a small-budget team without many big stars, so they MUST not be as good as Arsenal and Man City and Chelsea.”
If there is any competition in the world where consistent performance is rewarded, it’s the Premier League. The winner is the team that performs best over the course of a perfectly balanced 38-game season. Every team plays every other team once at home and once away. The winner is the team with the most points at the end. It’s almost a perfect system.
There’s no unbalanced schedule or divisions or conferences like there are in American sports, which often gives some teams scheduling advantages, with more games against weaker teams than against stronger teams. There are no playoffs, where an eighth-place or tenth-place or twelfth-place team can sneak in and then have a run of lucky results. If you’re ahead after 38 games, then you’ve been the best team for those 38 games.
And, in fact, all season long (well, not anymore) people have said Leicester wouldn’t be able to stay on top, specifically because it’s such a long season, and because the talent of the big clubs would eventually out.
As it turns out, they’ve been the best team in the league since about March of last year.
Well in my case it would be statistics that I would say point to them being less good. Again, not bad just less good. If you look at their expected goals stats, their chances created, chances conceded and a variety of other stats (including simple goal difference and number of 1-0 games) everything points to them being as much lucky as good and due for serious regression to the mean. Now, stats aren’t perfect and these stats in particular are not perfect, but they paint a story where Leicester should probably be 5th or 6th in the league and have all season.
It’s better to be lucky than good, but I come to this as a baseball fan first and Leicester seem like the 2013 Orioles to me (or frankly last year’s Royals). Playing better than they should be because other teams seem to forget how to play the sport when they play against them.
Maybe their ability to get other teams to hit woodwork when allowing a scoring opportunity is a legitimate skill that they have developed, but I doubt it. And they allow too many scoring opportunities for their run of clean sheets to be real. I’m not saying they won’t win the league, they probably will. I’m not saying that they aren’t good also. They most certainly are. But they have also been crazy lucky and that’s pretty obvious. That’s not because they are a small club, and that’s not to belittle them. Luck is a factor in sports and the best team doesn’t always win. Simply saying that they are the best team because they won the most games is silly though. They are the winning team because of that. Not the best.
I’m a big fan of sabermetrics in baseball. It can’t tell us everything, but it can tell us a lot. I’m much less convinced that statistics are as reliable in a game like soccer, where the nature of scoring is so different, and where the nature of the game itself makes it very difficult to draw reliable conclusions. Even the basic stuff that we’re measuring in soccer is, in some very real ways, much different than what we’re measuring in baseball.
For me, apart from the definitive and countable numbers like passes, corners, goals, etc., most of the stats in soccer rely far to heavily on subjective judgment. Things like “chances created” are sort of equivalent to baseball’s errors, where the very evaluation of whether something occurred or not is highly debatable. What constitutes a chance? Is there a difference between a good chance and a moderate one?
Even countable stuff like “shots on target” often doesn’t really account for the differences between the teams. I’ve seen games where one team will have a dozen shots on target, but every one is a weak shot from distance that is comfortably caught or parried by the keeper. I’ve seen other games where a team has very few shots on target, but sends four or five shots fizzing just a few inches outside the woodwork.
As someone who likes stats in sports, i understand that my own experiences watching the game do not account for all possible outcomes, and that there is information in the numbers that might elude me as a spectator. But i simply don’t think that stats in a flowing team soccer are as reliable as stats in a game like baseball, where so much of the game is reducible to a fairly straightforward one-on-one contest.
And a 1-goal difference in a soccer game is not the same, in terms of determining issues of luck and quality, as a 1-run difference in a baseball game. Scoring is more difficult in soccer than it is in baseball, and while a series of 1-run victories in a baseball league suggest luck, i think we need to be far more wary about drawing such conclusions in soccer.
By the way, i think you mean the 2014 Orioles. They won the division with a 96-66 record, but went 14-6 in extra-inning games, and 32-23 in 1-run games.
Dang it, yes I did. :smack:
Spurs were awesome last Sunday against Man U. They got totally dominated in the first 15-20 minutes but then clawed back. At halftime, still 0-0, I commented to my buddy that this is the sort of game champions find a way to win. And then three goals in under six minutes! Pure joy.
Someone snarked upthread that “Tottenham will win nothing and like it as usual”. Looks like he will be right on both counts, as we likely won’t win any silverware, but man, have I liked this season! COYS!
I’m a longtime Chelsea supporter (since 1979), and I’m thrilled for Ranieri and Leicester City. Well done. 
Suck it, Wenger.
So, West Ham are going to be paying £2.5m per year for the Olympic Stadium; Policing, stewarding, heating, lighting, goalposts and even corner flags included. What a great use of taxpayers money.
Maybe Cameron confused them with Villa again…
Jeez, I thought that was just for the use of the stadium, not all that other stuff included. A great deal for West Ham right enough, but I suspect it’s not going to be a great place to watch football as it’s still set up for use for athletics as well.
I don’t think Sir Alex would appreciate me quoting him, but after watching Liverpool v Dortmund…
“Football… Bloody Hell”
No kidding!