Are We Near the End for Roger?

Late into the Australian night Andy Murray battled past Roger Federer in five sets to reach his third Australian Open and sixth Grand Slam final. In doing so he beat Federer for the 11th time out of 20 encounters but crucially the first time in a Grand Slam Match.  It means that Murray has won the right to face Novak Djokovic in the Final and will want to have some revenge for the 2011 Australian Open Final where Murray was beaten in straight sets by Djokovic.  But for the me the question is how much longer will Roger be able to compete at the top level of tennis?

How much more do you pay to go English?

There have been plenty articles over the last two days talking about the prospect of Manchester United buying Crystal Palace winger Wilfried Zaha, the reports range in the value of the transfer for the 20 year old English International (a substitute appearance to watch Zlatan) but most saying somewhere between £12 million and £15 million.  Like most people I knew he was a good prospect but it was his performances in the League Cup last year which brought him to my attention, he tore Manchester United apart in Palace's shock 2-1 win.  The question for me is, will United be paying over the top for Zaha because he English?

He Doesn't Make It Easy To Like Him

I love maths almost as much as I love sport.  We are living in an age where we have access to the most information in sport ever, Sports like Baseball have embraced statistics with Sabermetrics being used by nearly every team now and it even spinning off an Hollywood film 'Moneyball'.  Other Sports have been slower to adopt stats mainly due to the ignorant miss use of stats when they haven't been put in context.

My "Favourite" Premier League Manager Rafa Benitez made a comment after Chelsea's 2-1 win against Arsenal, he said "These people who like to quote stats and stats, they don't have any clue about what is going on,".  That is like a stab in the back to me, he was saying that in regards to Fernando Torres, he followed that up with  "When you have one striker for a month and a half and cannot change, it's more difficult for the striker. When you have now two strikers, you can manage."   I am one of those people who uses statistics to analysis football because once it is put into context it can give an accurate reflection of a player's or a team's performance and now I am going to do what Rafa hates and show that Torres has been under performing by a career standards but by his Chelsea's standard's this is nothing to fret over.

Russell v Lawro - Week 2

Last week I challenged myself to see if I could compete with Mark Lawrenson in predicting the results of the weekend games of the Premiership.  After a poor performance in week one, with myself only getting 2 results right and no correct scores, getting nothing right on Saturday, compared to Lawro's 7 results right with two of them being correct scores,  I need do much better this week. Also here are the scores from last week.

The Ability Gulf

This morning, like many a tennis fan, I was sat in my office doing work but with half an eye on the live feed that the BBC provide for the Australian Open.  I watched and read Roger Federer ease into the third round with the anticipation of a good match between Laura Robson and Petra Kvitova, although I expected Robson to do well I thought she wouldn't have enough to beat the former Wimbledon champion.  Unexpectedly in the early hours of Friday morning the British number two beat the Czech eighth seed 2-6 6-3 11-9 in an error-strewn match with 92 errors and 30 double faults between them.  I have managed to see some highlights and to me Laura Robson should be very happy she met Kvitova when her serving was on holiday,

Kvitova served 18 aces which is impressive but not when you show that she also had 18 double faults.  Neither of those two stats are records for Grand Slams thou with Serena Williams hit 24 aces in one match at Wimbledon last year and pin up/tennis player, Anna Kournikova, hit 31 double faults in a match at Australian Open in 1999.  In searching for those statistics I came across two others which show the gulf in playing levels in the sport of Tennis.

1. In the last 9 years there have been only 7 different male winners of a grand slam, 4 of whom have only won one title.

2. In the first two rounds of the Australian Open Maria Sharapova hasn't lost a single game winning both matches 6-0, 6-0

And it made me wonder which gender has the biggest gap.The only fair comparison would be to look at those to stats but for the opposite gender and look at the differences and similarities

The Corner Conumdrum

First of apologies for no post since last Friday, a pub orientated weekend followed by a football orientated start to the the week meant I have hardly spent any time near my laptop in the last four days.  Last night I went to The Hawthorns for the chilling excitement of an FA Cup Third Round Replay match with high flying West Bromwich Albion playing host to bottom of the table Queens Park Rangers.  I was chilled to the bone but I wasn't excited at all and like most of the fans around me I was disappointed with both teams not wanting to be there, whose poor performances were only separated by a late headed goal from a corner.

This corner and others during the match made me quite angry for two reasons, firstly when the goal was scored there was not a man on one of the posts and the header went right where he would of stood and secondly nearly half of the corners taken where short, none of which came off. These are two of my greatest peeves.

Russell V Lawro - The Return

With the return of the blog I will reincarnate my favourite part of doing the blog last time. This will be the first of many Friday afternoon posts where once again I will be going one on one against the BBC legend Mark Lawrenson. As most of you know Lawro does predictions for every Barclay's Premier League each weekend, for his thoughts click here.  So I thought why not put my ideas into the fishing pot and see if I am can best the pro.

Fact or Fiction or Opinion?

I read the websites of most the major news papers in the UK to have a read of some of the different opinion columns, to see if some of them have seen things in a different light to me.  Some are good, some are bad and some are just stupid.  The this writer about one which I will write was brought to my attention only last week but has already driven me to write about him. James Lawton is a writer at The Independent, his piece on Tuesday in which he declared Messi to be a symbol of all that is wonderful about football as opposed to Suarez, who is all that is bad because of his handball goal against Mansfield, I was reminded of this incident.

Then he notes in his artcile today that: 'When Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger, who once plundered so brilliantly the best of his native France, recently signed a clutch of English-born players, including Jack Wilshere and Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain...'

I will skip the obviously retard line about Jack Wilshere, who has been on the Arsenal books since he was nine and if James Lawton's definition of recently is 12 years otherwise I will spend to long on who is stupider footballers or football writers.  But I am going talk about his idea that Wenger brought French then and buys English now.

It there any point to comparisons when they're done like this?

Yesterday Barcelona and Argentina forward Lionel Messi has been awarded the Ballon d'Or for a fourth year running as well as releasing the FIFA/FIFpro World XI.  Most of you will know that for the first time since its inception all of the players in World XI were from the same league, Liga BBVA. I often read other sports blogs and a few twitter feeds but I don't think I have ever seen such consternation to something like this before, people will obvious disagree with 1 or 2 of the list but like most I don't agree with 4 or 5 of them.

The Team is;

Iker Casillas (Real Madrid)
Dani Alves (Barcelona)
Gerard Pique (Barcelona)
Sergio Ramos (Real Madrid)
Marcelo (Real Madrid)
Andres Iniesta (Barcelona)
Xabi Alonso (Real Madrid)
Xavi (Barcelona)
Cristiano Ronaldo (Real Madrid)
Radamel Falcao (Atletico Madrid)
Lionel Messi (Barcelona)


That is the FIFA/FIFpro World XI and I think I know the reason why it is not very good,

Do you care where they come from?

Today we learnt that British women to be ranked in the top 50 in the world at the same time for more than 25 years. World Number 47 Heather Watson born in Guernsey to a Papua New Guinean mother and has trained at a Tennis Academy in Florida, USA since she was 12. World Number 50 Laura Robson born in Melbourne, Australia then moved to Singapore when she was 18 months old and then to the United Kingdom when she was six but after that she was trained by the Lawn Tennis Association at the National Tennis Centre.

What I am getting at here is that although we should be proud of the performances so far as they are both possible future stars of the sport of tennis, there are both different examples of the most common thing is modern sport.  One is British who went abroad to learn her sport then other is a foreign nation who came to to this country to learn this sport and adopted the nationality, "Multi-National Sport Stars"

Before the Olympics a few newspapers where going on about "Plastic Brits", foreign nationals representing the UK, but after the glorious two week love affair this country had with the Olympic and they have forgotten all about that and is still living off the euphoric high.  But since Immigration had a part to play in at least 24 of the 65 medals claimed by Team GB, should you care?

Controversy, Sports Unwanted Friend

Controversy and Sport have gone hand in hand ever since the the first caveman accused the other caveman of spoiling his hunt.  Today the current controversy Luis Suarez struck again, as a clear handball preceded his scoring of Liverpool's crucial second goal but this time to my eyes he didn't do it deliberately.  He hasn't anticipated the ball coming to him, it hits his hand and he puts the ball away full expecting to here the whistle but he doesn't so he goes and celebrates to his teams fans by kissing his hand.

This is where Luis shows that he takes his love of Toby young and Simon Pegg to heart and shows the world how to 'Lose Friends & Alienate People'.  It is not what he does that that sparks most of the controversy, it is the way he behaves afterwards that causes most peoples dislike of him.  Suarez still is one off the best strikers in the world and if he keeps this up he will not be remembered for his skill, but compared to some people in sport Suarez is basically a saint.

Here a my top 5 sporting scandals/controversies.

The Wildcard Weekend

After one of the more bizarre regular seasons I have seen we finally get to the still fresh "Wildcard Weekend".  After a referee lockout threatened to make a mockery of the game in the first 3 weeks of the season, once the proper officials came back the season really took off due to some fantastic games with the 49ers shutting out the Jets and the Patriots scoring 31 points in the final quarter against the Bills in week 4.

The season continued to grow with Andrew Luck and Robert Griffin III picking up record after record for rookie quarterbacks showing that they were worth being picked first and second in the 2012 draft.  And coming in to the final week of December all eyes were on Washington and thankfully not due to the 'Fiscal Cliff'.  The Dallas Cowboys turned up to FedEx Field needing a win to get into the post season but were defeated by new generation that has Washington atop the NFC East for the first time this millennium. There's Griffin -- the vocal leader, the Heisman Trophy winner, the team captain. And there's Morris -- the out-of-nowhere sixth-rounder from Florida Atlantic who merely ran for 200 yards and three touchdowns in the division-clincher and broke the franchise single-season rushing record.

And after another season of my Browns failing to get a .500 record, I need to look at away from the Browns  this weekend so here is what I think will happen this weekend. (I have put the home team first)

The Joys of January

The first weekend in January means a lot of different things to different people, for me it is all about the wonder that is knockout football.  This year we get the Third round of the FA Cup and the NFL's Wildcard weekend on the same weekend and I am going to be glued to both of them. Today I will be talking about the FA Cup, tomorrow I will talk about the NFL.

The Third Round is likable to many due to the chances of some David v Goliath matches as well as some genuine close matches. The habit of one or two lower division teams knocking out bigger teams will make them everyone's favourites for a while, Bradford have been riding on the success of the their league cup giant killings which have increased the attendances and spread the money to a team that need it.
Bradford are only two games against an out of form Villa away from a trip to Wembley this season and while a few may of thought they could of down well in the JPT and got a trip there, the possibility of going there twice is now more than just a flight of fancy.

The weekend also divides the viewing public with pretty much everyone cheering on the "Plucky Underdogs" against the "Football Business's" unless your team is the Football Business in question.  They will want to see an upset, so here are 5 matches to watch and 5 not to watch look for that glorious upset

"You'd have to be a real dope to mess it up"

Being a Manchester United fan it is hard to hide to write this piece with showing my contempt for Chelsea and Rafa Benitez but I will try and keep it to just facts so it doesn't come across much.

Just a few hours after Queens Park Rangers boss Harry Redknapp says only "a real dope" would fail as manager of west London rivals Chelsea, Chelsea lost at home 1-0 to QPR thanks to a Shaun Wright-Phillips goal, some backs to the wall defending by QPR and a questionable offside decision.

Chelsea dominated throughout but could not break down QPR's packed defence and looked a very different team to the side that put Villa to the sword in there last home.  that is because it was Chelsea made 5 changes from the starting XI that beat Everton at the weekend and 4 from the starting XI, albeit one enforced due to Cech's injury.

Rafa Benitez is famous for his rotation of his squads and so far has yet to name the same starting XI two games in a row and the two times they have lost is when he has made the most changes (4 - West Ham, 5 - QPR), the question is this damaging his teams chances of the title?

How to find out who is the best team?

There are many tried and tested methods of determining who is the best team overall, be it league or cup there are so many different variations that you could easily spend hours if not days comparing an contrasting between them.

My personal favourite is 'The Unofficial Football World Championships' is strips away all pretense of a fair system and stumps for the simplest system 'If you beat the current holder, you become the holder'.  For a more read then beginners guide on the UFWC site here.

Without knowing the UFWC I would be surprised, if you would be able to guess the current holder of the title and the greatest team of all time.  It is North Korea (some say DPR Korea) and Scotland respectively  they have defended the title for the whole of this year propelling themselves to 20th in the overall rankings.  For those who want to more about the UFWC, have a read of the end of year review here, it is worth a read.

After a discussion about this at work I was left with wondering if I applied the same logic to English league football, I then did some looking around on the interweb and no-one had done that yet.  So I set about trying to workout how to do this, I decided upon doing just the 20 years of Premier League first as all the match data was easily available on the internet.  I have now created the 'The Unofficial Premier League Champions' or UPLC.

It is Back

As it is a new year I though i would bring back the blog, after a bumper year of sport 2012 has left us and 2013 has begun.  We have already crowned the first 2013 world champion as Phil 'The Power' Taylor won his 16th world darts title by beating Michael van Gerwen 7-4 in an absorbing PDC World Championship final.

The main reason this is back is for me to have the ability to rant about sport again but I did this mainly to show the world what I did when i was bored over the Christmas Period, more on that in the next post.


I will try and post daily but don't hold me to that and will also get some trivia questions going as well throughout the return of the blog.

All there is left to say is I hope you enjoy reading this as much as I will get from writing it.


Trivia Question 1 (Answer will be given with the next trivia question)

Can you name the 3 football teams that have 4 separate spans in the English Premier League?