So much soccer, I need more eyeballs

Soccer Cornucopia

Is this the best time of year?  I could eat Thanksgiving dinner every day.  I live for leftovers...mix and match all that chow into every conceivable manner of ingestion.  And there's something to be said for that one beautiful day where I can turn my phone off, ignore my computer and do so guilt free (I'll admit it, I get off the grid now and again...but I feel a little guilty)...honestly, for that reason alone we need some more holidays on the calendar.

But the real delicious stuff is : MLS playoffs, European leagues and tournaments chugging along, an international break for Euro Qualifiers and US national aficionados to dope out the next group of up-and-coming heros, NCAA tournament just around the corner...

RIP, 2014, We Barely Knew Ye:
The Haverford College men just missed the NCAA tournament this fall...lost in the final of the Centennial Conference to #9 ranked Muhlenberg, 1-0 (with 2 min. 37 seconds remaining in regulation) after defeating #4 ranked Franklin & Marshall, 2-0, on their home patch in the semi-final.  (Division III men's bracket)  Three finals in four years under Coach Shane Rineer, and a regular season title in the year we didn't make the final...good things are happening.

USA / Colombia:
Great game for all those who love America.  From Craven Cottage (12.45 PM Friday, Nov. 14th, ESPN & WATCHESPN.com), so many European-based players on display.  Klinsmann has a great blend of old and new players...cool article on the leadership component of these friendlies (and how this game may affect the next Olympic squad) on ussoccer.com.

Challenge of a championship:
For all the trophys we hand out these days, here's the real deal.  A team has but two shots at being a champion - the conference title and a national title.  A little tougher than beating 4 other youth teams at the East Jesus Nowhere Classic.  Consider that the top 199 teams in Division III scored 30 or more goals in roughly 18-20 games.  Some numbers:
404 teams, 42 conferences, 1 national title

Think that's daunting?  Division I has 24 conferences and 204 schools.  With the top half scoring merely 23 goals or more in 18-20 games. Yikes.

Haves and have nots:
Di Maria (Manchester United) cost more than Burnley have spent in their entire history on player wages.

Awesome, Thinking Man's Goal:
Robbie Keane scored the second in LA's 5-0 drubbing of RSL on Sunday night...what an amazing effort and terrific awareness to keep himself in an onside position while Landon got the cross sorted out:

Where Does Talent Come From:
Arsene Wenger of Arsenal might not even know!  He made two statements this year that resonated with me: no good professional defenders (that were available) and FWDs are better-built on the rough and tumble of the favela than in the elite academies?!

"There is not a lot on the market and if you look at the other clubs, they had exactly the same problem. If you went anywhere, everybody is looking for defenders."

"If you look across Europe, South America is the only continent that develops strikers," he said."

This is interesting for two reasons: 1. defense is much more a learned skill than 1v1 attacking where creativity and quickness of thought (both very hard to train into someone) tip the scales...oughtn't we expect to see tons of great defenders coming from the academy system? and, 2. if a region where the academy system hasn't taken root is where the best goal scorers are coming from does that mean players take advantage of playground ball (where no one really plays any defense) or are freed from stifling coaches and systems?

Even If You're Good, You're Not Good Enough:
Georgetown, nationally ranked power year after year in NCAA men's soccer played an interesting match at Villanova earlier this month...won 2-1 and played some very good football.  Nova, for their part, played very well also.  What's interesting is that a friend who has some front office responsibilities for an MLS club and who was there scouting draft picks said, very offhandedly, "there's no speed on this field."  It was in context of another topic, but that phrase stuck in my ear, and my jaw hit the floor.  I mean, come on, these are two contending division I teams...but then when you start to watch for it, there wasn't a player who got in the game who was running past an opponent.  Virtually every player was as fast as any other.  Which means, to the pro clubs, none of them are fast enough!  Now, consider the Chelsea/Liverpool matchup last Sunday, and think about Eden Hazard, Raheem Sterling and Co...at that level, those guys are that fast.  Yup, they have the technical ability, but what makes them special is the speed.  Some video proof against Xavier, another terrific Big East team:

Stuff on TV this week:

Nov. 12: ESPN 4pm / 7pm MVC men's soccer tournament
                         Mexico V. Netherlands  2.45pm

Nov. 13: ESPN 4.30pm / 7pm Horizon League men's soccer tournament

Nov. 14: ESPN (click for the list...Euro Qualifiers, USA Friendly with Colombia and NCAA men's stuff)
               FOX networks: Euro Qualifiers

Leadership Rambling

Lord Acton Was Right

Book Suggestion

I've marveled for years how so many soccer players appear content to win the starting job, or be selected as a captain, or be simply pleased with themselves as senior players on a team.  None of which ensures a team's success on game day.  Certainly the most frequent stumbling block of a team endeavor, this balance of the intermediate individual goals and the aim of creating a successful team.  Consider this stat:

Of the approximately 10,000 men's NCAA Division III soccer players, 3% of all players earn All-Region (and by extension 41 of those same players are selected to the 41 All-American spots) whereas one quarter of one percent of teams win a title. If you select for All-Conference honors, assuming that each of the 43 conferences select 1st, 2nd and honorable mention teams, that's about 1419 players, or almost 15% of all players earning an individual honor.

Bottom line, it's way easier to be noticed individually than as a team.

Everyone gets a trophy, right?

Pithy quotes about leadership are tossed about frequently, but upon the rare occasion when empirical research offers a qualitative endorsement of a particular point, it's worth paying attention.  In Daniel Goleman's "Focus" he cites research by Dacher Keltner of Cal Berkley about the emotional and empathetic attention of people by hierarchal status:

Keltner's group has found similar attention gaps just by comparing high-ranking people in an organization with those at the lower tiers on their skill at reading emotions from facial expression.  In any interaction the more high-power person tends to focus his or her gaze on the other person less than others, and is more likely to interrupt and to monopolize the conversation - all signifying a lack of attention.
In contrast, people of lower social status tend to do better on tests of empathetic accuracy, such as reading others' emotions from their faces - even just from muscle movements around the eyes.  By every measure they focus on people more than do people of higher power.

(From P.124 "Focus")

Power corrupts....and absolute power corrupts absolutely, as the good Baron observed.  And here we might see why.  People in positions of greater power (ostensibly leaders) simply stop paying attention to others.  That's not a anecdotal observation of a 19th century aristocrat, it's an empirical fact of 21st century social science.  The implication of the research of course is that the trickle-down effect of this sort of behavior may be what keeps teams from performing at their peak.  At each step of the hierarchy, the person holding a higher power position is tuning out the person(s) "beneath" them.

Of course, were a leader to be empathetic and inclusive, would they be lauded and held up as an example to be followed?  You wish, pollyanna.  They'd be torn apart as weak and uncertain.  A killer catch-22.

Which brings to mind another smart fellow who said "Those who seek power are not worthy of that power."  That's been around for a while; since 400 BC, give or take a few decades.

Effective teams and effective leaders somehow manage to dodge some of these obstacles...but there can't just be one effective leader- the whole group has to be populated with some pretty fertile raw material in leadership terms to ensure smooth, top-to-bottom attention (and by extension, value) is paid to all stakeholders.

Blustering like Chris Christie or making grandiose promises like Obama get you elected (because too few understand what truly effective leaders look like?)...but true leadership and effective team building is the product of a much humbler and inclusive approach.

Offside Law

Offside Law

Always a source of confusion, the 11th law of the game offers the most strife in the game.  Unlike many other sports and even the other laws of soccer, offside depends heavily on the official's determination that the player in question is "interfering with play/an opponent" or "gaining an advantage" and on the official's and player's ability to get the timing just right.  Simple enough in writing, but it's pretty surprising how often the judgement of the official proves the size of the gray areas!

At the bottom, a great video on forwards using different approaches to manage the law.

Here's the law verbatim from the head honchos at FIFA:


That's it...the eleventh law in it's entirety (the penalty awarded info was left off, but this is all the laws say about the offside position).

The keys: to be onside, the attacker receiving the ball must have two "defenders" regardless of their position (GK, CB, MF, whatever) even with him or her, or closer to the goal line than him or her.  Any two opposing players will do.  Similarly, if the ball is even with or closer to the goal than the attacking player he or she cannot be offside.  The ball trumps opponents.

The trick is in the timing.  The position of the attacker in question only matters at the exact instant her teammate makes contact with the ball.  At the top level, an arm in an offiside position doesn't matter; a head or leg does (obviously torso too).  That's an incredibly precise distinction to have to make...and if you're not familiar with the speed of live action at the senior level, well, there's a reason FIFA makes officials retire at 45.

So here're a few common areas of difficulty, particularly at the youth level.

In the attacker's 1/2:

When a player is in her own half of the field, no matter how many opponents are or are not between her and the opponents goal line, she cannot be offside.  In the graphic, we see the black player (attacking "UP") with only one yellow player between her and the goal line.

Because she is in her half, she is in an onside position - though it's worth remembering that on a long clearance, she may have been inside her own half when the ball was struck, but be well into the opponent's half (and behind the second-to-last defender) when she receives the ball...

Level with the final 2 defenders:

Sometimes, especially at set pieces, an attacker will be level with the last two defenders and have no opponent closer to the goal line than himself.  While the most common offside calls take for granted that the GK is firmly between the attacker and the goal line, it is not law that there be a player between the attacker and the goal line.  Remember too, that the defenders are any of the opposing team; the GK is not special in this regard.  As we say, "even is on," whether it's even with the second-to-last defender, or the last two:

GK above the ball:

This one is probably the toughest from a standpoint of the sheer rarity with which it is seen.  Haverford College got caught on one of these at Washington College in 2013 on a corner.  Essentially, the GK took a very aggressive position high off the goal line, and compounded the unusual nature of this defense by having only one teammate stand on a post.  When the ball was played initially (red arrow) all was fine, the receiving player was even with the GK and the player on the post was between the receiving player and the goal line.  Then, he passed the ball back to his teammate (yellow arrow), who, at the time of the pass being struck was only even with the player on the post; he was below the GK!  Offside was the call, and correctly so.

"Coming Back"

This one is always tough, especially when fans (and coaches and players) get caught ball-watching.  Because the eye is distracted from the bigger picture, a player in an offside position who comes back (after the ball is played) to receive the ball in an onside position is often confused with being onside.  Especially as players get older, and defenses become more sophisticated, and forwards learn to play with a bit more guile, and the players and ball move much faster, this call requires close attention.

ARs typically use this technique: they watch the second-to-last defender and the player in danger of being offside, but listen for the contact on the ball by the teammate playing the pass.  Just as an umpire can use the sound of a ball hitting the first baseman's glove to make a close call.  This saves them from having to be able to see a player far from the offside line and the line itself simultaneously; most players and coaches and fans watch the player hit the pass, then turn their eyes toward the receiving player...and lots can change by the time their eyes reach that receiving player.

If the attacker in this image (black with red arrow) receives the ball at the end of the red arrow, the only thing that matters is where he was when the ball was struck by the gray teammate.  If he is on the black dashed line, he's offside.  If he gets to be level with the second-deepest yellow (outfield) defender, he's ok.

Simple, but the timing and geometry of the call bamboozle many, if not most, ARs and fans.  I exclude coaches because our players would never be offside, nor are the other guy's forwards ever onside!  Ditto players...

Interfering With Play

This is a common occurrence from set pieces.  Any ball served into the penalty area and is cleared generates this set up:


The four defenders are stepping up the field as the black player at midfield (dashed white perimeter) serves the ball back into the mix.  Picture this image as a freeze-frame just as the server strikes the ball; the player inside the 18 is clearly offside, but the teammate (white with black perimeter) is on-side...


The ball's flight (red arrow) crosses over the player who is off-side, but working to recover to an on-side position (green arrow).  The white player is fine, and has taken advantage of being on-side to receive the ball in the space left by the advancing defenders.

Here's the caveat: if the off-side teammate interferes (completely in the referee's opinion...the official has a great deal of discretion) with the play, for example, screening the GK's view of the ball, attempting to play the ball, or offer an option to the teammate receiving the ball, or by distracting/engaging one of the defenders, that player may be adjudged to be affecting the play, and therefore gaining an advantage by having been in an offside position.  If that player gets out of the way without affecting the "natural" progression of the play (makes him/herself invisible) then all's well.

Check out Marco Di Vaio from Montreal Impact uses the law to his advantage in this video...really cool stuff:



And here's Robbie Keane of LA making a herculean effort to stay onside as Donovan picks out the pass...watch it a couple times and see how close Keane was to being offside...and, notably, it was the ball that kept him onside as both he and Donovan are behind the second-to-last defender: