Vocabulary for chaos
Every now and then, an American discovers a diagram of cricket fielding positions and has four minutes of joy. ("Fine leg? Silly point? Wicket keeper??"). I kind of think we need the same for uncontrolled football phases of play.
Football is one of the few major sports where the extremities that make humans unique - the dextrous, dextrous hands - aren't the thing in control. The sport's soul is an unpredictable bounce. So maybe there should be a clearer way of describing that.
Of course, there's a risk that trying to put names on these flux-y states deceives people even further into thinking there's order to them. But maybe it's worth trying.
A large part of why this comes to mind is a project I recently blew full-time on, where chaos was a significant part of it. There's a screen-recorded journey through it below, the main takeaways being that open-source packages like kloppy and databallpy are cool and that there are smarter ways of doing a 'low effort' project when your main focus is Wimbledon.
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Some brief admin, in that I've moved newsletter service to Ghost, which shouldn't affect y'all but does mean that the main https://www.getgoalsideanalytics.com/ site is the place to go to re-read, subscribe, etc.
And, lastly, you can buy a PDF of the Get Goalside writing from the 2024/25 season - which helps cover web hosting costs and things like that - here:
Happy reading. Now time to work out what the 'silly mid-off' of football is...