Avoiding the Drop

So, yeah, I missed yesterday. Not my fault; the alcohol prevented me from remembering the dullness of the Ivory Coast-Portugal game (you’ll get your fancy little French name back when you play better, guys), and while the New Zealand-Slovakia game was entertaining (particularly the final goal), it’s hard to get that excited when I’ve heard of exactly two players on the entire field (Vladimir Weiss & Martin Skrtel, in case you’re interested).

As for Brazil-North Korea, well…we’ll talk about that right after the jump.

We keep hearing about this ball, and about how it’s supposed to knuckle and all that, but so far the only time I’ve seen that actually help a goalscorer was Maicon’s goal. That’s clearly a cross that’s “knuckled” or whatever the wrong way, and it ends up in the back of the net.

Which brings us to the ball. The common logic goes like this: the ball, because of it’s ridging (or whatever, I’m not gonna pretend to understand the physics), is VERY hard for a keeper to grasp. And I buy that. The problem is, the first part of the equation is missing; namely, in order for a save to be necessitated, the ball needs to be controllable by the striker.

So far, only one country – Germany – has looked good with this ball. Perhaps not ironically, Adidas (the manufacturer of the Jabulani) is a German company, and the Bundesliga has had access to the ball for six months.

Now, that’s not really a conspiracy; MLS has had access, too. The Premier League has not, however; their matchball is made by Nike, as is Spain’s. However, the ball is definitely different, and shots are sailing unpredictably; keepers are almost redundant, as they can barely save shots when they DO end up on frame. Which isn’t often.

Mario Gomez says this about that ball:

“Once you have learned to make proper contact with the ball, you can make it travel very fast. It’s a case of catching it right. You learn how to do that with practice. We are confident about scoring with this ball.”

And that’s kind of the problem. These guys are professionals, and are used to playing with something that should be a constant. There’s no benefit to changing it; it’d be like making them play on pavement instead of grass. The ball should be the ball should be the ball; it doesn’t need to change.

Now of course, that doesn’t explain away all of Brazil’s problems (or North Korea’s surprisingly determined performance); in particular, it looked like Dunga was almost found out there, based partially on an inability to adjust his tactics for the pressures of the North Korean game. That’s surprising, because one would have to think that he’d prepared for an “eleven man behind the ball” counter-attacking approach (it seems the easiest way to beat Brazil, really). Also, though, one has to give credit to North Korea; there were moments there where I thought the worst team in the tournament was about to beat the best team, and I still kind of feel that they deserved a draw there.

Anyways: today’s game.

HON 0-1 CHI

GOALS
HON: 34′ – Jean Beausejour

• Chile’s technically playing 4-3-3, which (like I mentioned in the Group H preview) is odd; usually he goes with a weird 3-3-1-3 formation that’s heavy on attack. In this case, however, he’s got Vidal out on the left; Vidal is more of a midfielder than defender, and as the game goes on it looks more and more like he’s slid up to play left mid. No Suazo, however.
• As this game progressed, it became clear that Alexis Sanchez was planning on making a real pest of himself with the Honduras defense; he was good on the ball, but his constant off-ball movement was just as frustrating.
• Chile probably sent Vidal up because there was really no reason to keep four defenders back; Honduras was running a 4-4-1-1 (so four guys would be marking, at most, two people), and since they were never able to get the ball into Chile’s half anyways it made more sense to concentrate on possession.
• If you get a chance, look at FIFA’s tactical lineup for this game (it’s in Flash, so that doesn’t take you right there, but it’s close). It’s similar to the heat map, but for the entire team, and tells the average position of a player over a fifteen minute span. In the first half, the only Chilean player whose average position was inside the Chilean half was Waldo Ponce, their centerback. Everyone else spent the majority of their time in the Honduran half. To say that this team was “attacking” is really understating the whole thing.
• Honduras has also somehow managed to cover more distance (at least as of this writing), without somehow also controlling any other statistical area. There must be a lot of random running.
• We should again point out that Alexis Sanchez is awesome, and someone’s gonna snap him up after the tournament. If not sooner.