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.

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...