Height certainly could in no way be construed as a distadvantage, Peter Schmeichal who IMHO (and the opnion of many others) is the best goalkeeper of all time and certianly the best of the last decade was 6’4".
Name a sport that a woman is the world champion.
Synchronized swimming?
This sentence is lacking at least one word.
Apoptosis, goalkeeping is a mixture of reach and agility.
And the optimum mix of these attributes is most common around approx. 6’ to 6’4".
In the far-off gender neutral future, there would be women playing at the highest level in mixed teams. But I think they would be a minority, and it would also depend on position. There might be quite a few female left-wingers, but very very few female goalkeepers.
I mentioned it earlier: Free diving
i dont know if this is still relevant, as we seem to have drifted a bit off topic, but womens world cup star Hannah Ljungberg is apparently going to sign for Perugia in Seria A in the new year. i dont know if its just a PR stunt (its the same team that signed Col. Gaddafis son in the summer), but im looking forward to see how she compares to the best male players in the world.
Do you have a cite for this, as I couldn’t find one. Perugia as you say are well known for there PR-inspired signings, but i can see sevral problems with this: I don’t think women players can register in the Serie A and also I doubt she is good enough to play at this level as there is such a huge gulf between the highest lecel of the men’s game and the highets ;level of the women’s game.
** Milum**
Name a sport that a woman is the world champion.
Priceguy
This sentence is lacking at least one word.
Milum
Name a sport that a woman is not the world champion.
(Ok, now I’ve said it but now I feel somehow cheapened; condesending and patronizing, and oh-so Politically Correct.)
Hey** MC**, free diving is not a sport, it is a beauty contest involving grace, form, style, and skill. Not fair, men don’t have a chance.
Free diving is sport and it’s not one that involves grace or form, it’s basically: ‘how deep can you dive without any breathing apparatus’ and the current world record holder by quite a margin is a woman.
Re Hannah Ljungberg signing for Perugia, here’s a Spanish language cite that claims that they have been planning to sign her, and there are several Swedish newspaper sites that contain a similar story (I googled on Perugia Ljungberg). I can’t find anything to say it’s happened though.
Also, a cached page from a Channel 4 Football Italia story (which I can’t link to for some reason) includes a couple of interesting points:
When considering the veracity of Gaucci as a source we ought to factor in that he also claimed “She will be tall, blonde, with blue eyes and a wonderful smile,” whereas in fact she is 5’4" with dark brown hair.
Milum: Whatever the rights and wrongs of the point you’re trying to make, perhaps you should stay off this board until you’ve learned English?
everton posted…
Milum: Whatever the rights and wrongs of the point you’re trying to make, perhaps you should stay off this board until you’ve learned English?
Listen ** everton**, goodbuddy, it’s called an idiom. Perhaps you should stay off this board until you’ve learned good manners.
No it isn’t an idiom Milum, it’s just bad English.
“Name a sport that a woman is the world champion” is meaningless; “Name a sport that a woman is not the world champion” is also meaningless, and although it’s clear that you intended to make a joke when you said you were being “Politically Correct” that’s the opposite of what you were being.
Now now everton the king’s english has taken wing since it left the motherland 200 years ago; stop being a pedant.
Back to the debate…
Are men better soccer players than women?
No… And grits ain’t groceries, and eggs ain’t poultry, and Mona Lisa was a man.
And some people who post on Straight Dope will argue with a stump.
It seems like most of the debate in this group is because there is a fuzzy definition of the word “sport”. Most popular spectator sports (e.g. soccer, American football, baseball, basketball, track & field) require at least some measure of absolute strength and speed to be successful.
As more women have participated in these sports, the skill gap has closed, to be sure (e.g. Radcliffe’s record would have won the men’s Olympic marathon in the 60’s) but it’s doubtful that with “equal attention” any women would become a champion in a top sport.
There is some medical evidence to suggest that in ultra-marathon events (e.g 100-mile running races) women may possess a physiological edge over men because they may burn fat more efficiently and “wear” more slowly - which may also correlate somewhat with longer lifespans for women.
Ann Trason, for example, has never won the Western States 100-mile race, but she routinely finishes in the top 10 (I believe finishing 3rd one year) and there are far fewer women (or a smaller “funnel” of participants) in these races. It’s not beyond the possible to think that with equal participation and attention from women they could match men at these events.
:dubious: if the fastest person is a man, why does it matter how many women are participating in the race?
The point being that if there’s only a few women, and one of them is competitive at the highest level, then women may have an advantage. Many times in this thread it has been pointed out that fields where women don’t have as much participation may skew the results in favor of the men. The point was that 100-,ile+ is one of those events, yet there is a highly competitve woman.
Side note: Could we move the goalkeeper height debate to a different thread?
I think it’s interesting and appropriate, actually.
Milum, so far you’ve said nothing of interest at all. Do you have anything to contribute, grammatically correct or not?
“Milum, so far you’ve said nothing of interest at all. Do you have anything to contribute, grammatically correct or not?” - Priceguy
Quite the contrary** Mr. Priceguy**, my comments have been directed towards the absurdity of the proposition. I thought it best that young girls not be led down a primrose path to disappointment.
There is a harsh cruel real world out there but it seems that the whimsical among us like to live in a fairy world of pretend.
Please forgive my intrusion.
Hi ya, Ellis Dee.
Lol, when you first requested citation it made me wonder how I was going to recreate material gathered about 12 years ago. There wasn’t much on the 'net then and, although I can’t find the exact references from then, the use of 4 search engines yielded some interesting, similar info. Otherwise, there would be a lot of time spent at libraries. 
I remember first encountering this information in Phil Donahue’s book “The Human Animal”, and went on from there. The specific passage that i recall was in terms of refuting the supposition that women were not up to being astronauts. The countering argument, that can almost be recalled verbatim was “…they require less food and less oxygen, they hear better, and are better at locating small objects in a large field of vision”.
This would, in many ways, make sense. “Who’s coming at me” would be a necessary response of prey rather than predator, buying time needed for escape. Predators, including humans, have forward looking eyes – binocular type vision – geared towards calculating depth and distance (spatial), and providing focus. Creatures likely to be preyed upon, such as horses, squirrels, deer, have eye structures (such as the more rods and cones in the back of the eye) designed to facilitate the early warning peripheral vision. For example, a horse’s peripheral vision grants them a wide panoramic view; their only blindspot being directly behind them.
BRAIN SEX: The real difference between men and women
by Anne Moir, Ph.D. and David Jessel.
Dell Publishing (paperback), New York, 1992.
(From a book, no online source found)
…Men and women even see some things differently. Women see better in the dark. They are more sensitive to the red end of the spectrum, seeing more red hues there than men, and have a better visual memory. Men see better than women in bright light. Intriguing results also show that men tend to be literally blinkered; they see in a narrow field - mild tunnel vision - with greater concentration on depth. They have a better sense of perspective than women. Women, however, quite literally take in the bigger picture. They have wider peripheral vision, because they have more of the receptor rods and cones in the retina, at the back of the eyeball, to receive a wider arc of visual input.
Which would tie in with this: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2003/apr03/04-03WomenViewPR.asp
“REDMOND, Wash. – April 3, 2003 – Microsoft Research has found that women are 20 percent faster in navigating 3-D environments on computers when optical flow cues, or continuous visual cues for navigation, are built into an application’s user interface. This discovery is a key factor in overcoming known gender differences in the approach men and women use in navigating 3-D environments. The study concludes that software designers should build applications optimized for large displays and multimonitor configurations, because these form factors more naturally allow for the presence of optical flow cues in scenarios such as gaming, graphic design, architectural walkthroughs and various training programs.”
Sex Difference in the Brain
“Other findings seemed also to point to female superiority in landmark memory. Researchers tested the ability of individuals to recall objects and their locations within a confined space–such as in a room or on a tabletop. In these studies, women were better able to remember whether items had changed places or not. Other investigators found that women were superior at a memory task in which they had to remember the locations of pictures on cards that were turned over in pairs. At this kind of object location, in contrast to other spatial tasks, women appear to have the advantage.”
(You need an Amazon account to view this, it seems.)
**Handbook of Road Technology (Transportation Studies)
by M. G. Lay
**
When discussing peripheral vision and agents that have an impact on it:
“…The extent of peripheral vision is influenced by a number of factors:
*gender. Women have a larger peripheral field than men…”
This certainly explains the anecdotal questions such as why does a woman spot (and react strongly to) a spider or mouse moving along the baseboard, while their male is sitting there saying, “I didn’t see anything. You’re imagining it”. Lol.
Now I’ll research that “women and groups/teamwork” issue.