Soccermetrics: Let the Data … Squeak?

Posted on August 26, 2015 by Daniel (@MKNN)

{My opening salvo drew what is–for me–a much, much wider audience than almost anything else I’ve written. So that’s great, but it also ups the pressure for this second post. We’ll see if I’m up to it.

I am trying to keep these relatively brief (< 1K words), as my goal is to build an ongoing context/set of hypotheses to work from over time. That may bite me, as it prevents some deeper data dives, but I’ll incorporate those separately as I can.

Finally, a tip of the hat to fantastic designer Juhan Sonin (@JSonin) for the title and rallying cry.}

I want to work the baseball comparison a little more.

There was a moment in the late 90s where I had four different websites running off various versions of databases that contained complete historical information for the entirety of MLB history. (This was before baseball-reference took over the world–I mean that in a good way.) One of these had been modified and extended to include minor league players, another for hundreds of players from the Negro Leagues, another tracked fantasy performance in relation to actual. And this was pretty easy to do. The core data and its structure was easily available, and importing it into SQL (it was the 90s) and optimizing it, writing stored procedures, etc was all relatively straightforward given a moderate amount of technical skill.

This was the baseline, and it was pretty rich: yearly performance totals for every player and every team, ever. Sure, the data flaked out the further back or further afield you went, but it was a solid platform for building and testing notions and working hypotheses.

Note the focus: I am most interested in player performance. There is some great work being done on team performance, and, yay, that’s fantastic. But I am most fascinated by how the individuals combine to create that performance. In sabermetric terms, I am more interested in analyzing Win Shares than Wins.

This is entirely missing from the soccermetrics ecology.

It gets back to one of the points from my Opening Salvo: we aren’t counting useful things.

And I don’t see a solve for this: I don’t think there are enough useful things to count on a seasonal basis. I enhanced that sentence because it’s damn important: the things that are emerging that seem worth counting are almost exclusively context- and situation- dependent. The data we have barely squeaks at the player level.

So, let’s dive into that for a moment, again working the baseball parallel.

I really don’t think it is possible to overestimate the importance of Retrosheet (and, by extension, the tireless efforts of Dave Smith) in the growth of sabermetrics. Retrosheet isn’t sexy, it isn’t fancy, there’s no infinite scroll, 3-column theme, there’s very little to invite the casual user into its labyrinthine depths. There are also no ads.

What it is: a thoroughly vetted, crowd-sourced, amateur (in the absolutely best sense of the word) repository.

It was among the earliest successful efforts at statistical crowdsourcing. Retrosheet would help a researcher gain access to box scores (often grainy photocopies of newspaper accounts or scoresheets provided by people who attended the games), the researcher would convert that information into a digital, structured form and send it back. Over time, this meant a game by game, and in many cases, play by play, database emerged that was publicly accessible and queryable. Suddenly, if you wanted to know what Honus Wagner did on July 17, 1910, you could. That’s pure esoterica. But the data generated significant research as well.

There was a source of trusted information–and if you couldn’t find it, Tom Ruane could and usually would.

So, we have two things that were simultaneously available/emerging: a standard for game-by-game reporting and easy access to important season-over-season historical information.

This allowed a much wider range of innovation, and while there were many, many missteps, it was critical to a true understanding of the game. Not only did Bill James famously “break the wand,” there was also nothing that he did that other people could not have done. I mean, short of being less dedicated, less innovative, less determined, and less entertaining than James.

The parallel here is to the various game-state data systems that exist in proprietary forms right now: things that track field position, activity, time, stuff like that (that is, with the score 2-1, Juan Mata attempted a cross from x,y coordinate on the right wing and a foul was called on Marouane Fellaini).

Not only is there nothing like this for soccer, nothing seems coming on the horizon.

The reason, essentially, is profit. And, look, I respect the profit drive. I think, yes, Opta (and all the rest) should profit from their work. See here for a decent overview of the issue.

But it’s not an either/or situation (it rarely is). The possibilities are legion, but the obvious solve is for those organization to release partial data sets (entire past seasons, all data for a single team, all data for a dozen players, whatever–you can slice this however you want). But release it in an easily downloadable, structured, form.

Yes, the data will be imperfect; yes, the older data is likely not nearly as rich as current information. But you know what?

It won’t matter.

That information will yield both gold and dross. And Opta (or whomever) would retain their competitive edge by incorporating the gold into their current and future products.

Somehow, some way, we have to let the data scream, loudly and publicly.

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Reading Well: Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

Posted on August 18, 2015 by Daniel (@MKNN)

Station Eleven is delightful and complicated and a well-needed antidote to the brutal banality of much post-apocalyptic fiction.

Emily St. John Mandel has posited a world where a horrifically virulent disease has wiped out something like 499 of every 500 people. The devastating impact of this is handled with a lyrical grace that is stunning, in one chapter simply listing out all of the things that simply fall apart. The practicalities are intriguing as well: the sheer abundance of bodies makes cities inhospitable, with the survivors trying to rebuild their lives either constantly on the move, in small enclaves that emerge in the sparsely populated intersections of abandoned highways, or small rural communities. It all holds together, and if perhaps she underestimates the speed with which bits of technology would reappear, that is a small quibble easily surrendered.

The book follows several strands simultaneously, moving around in time with little effort and with a clarity that is rarely found in the genre. The protagonist was a child when the disease struck, and her harrowing first two years of survival are only referenced and never fully described. This is the antidote mentioned above: St. John Mandel writes about what happens after all the rape and carnage, what is left once the bloodbath has faded. Don’t get me wrong: there is grave peril in the book (and some rape and carnage), and clear acceptance that not everyone, perhaps not even most, would be guided by their higher nature in such circumstances.

But the focus is on a traveling symphony, a group of artists whose caravan moves along a small route in the Midwest, stopping to alternate classical music with performances of Shakespeare, their lead wagon covered with a slogan pilfered from Star Trek, Because Survival is Insufficient. Lovely. Their camaraderie and commitment to the transformational potential of performance is captured sweetly, and the relationships that matter most are generally among these characters.

The overall plot is compelling, but not the reason to read the book. Instead, it’s the smaller things: the description of the arc of discovery for many characters that this is not just another news story, but a legitimate global disaster; the creation of a museum of artifacts from before the disaster in a small airport lounge; the subtle presentation of character’s weaknesses in a way that doesn’t alienate us from sympathizing with them.

Another quote (and contra Sartre): Hell is the absence of the people you long for. Ultimately, Station Eleven is about that hell, and the slow recreation of humanity on the other side of the passage through it.

Highly recommended.

#WhatIWishICouldDo

The ability to move from narrative thread to narrative thread without confusing or annoying the reader. I was never unsure of where or when I was, and I was fairly equally engaged in each of the strands, whether they ultimately connected or not.

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@The Movies with PopPop: The Lone Ranger (What?)

Posted on August 14, 2015 by Daniel (@MKNN)

You may not believe this, but I’m recommending you see The Lone Ranger, a 2013 release, with Johnny Depp as in incredible Tonto.

When it was first released, I had a very negative reaction to what I understood about it. Over the past few months, I’d heard various positive comments from unanticipated sources — a Native American activist and a left wing political commentator whom I respect. So we watched it.

First, the central character is Tonto, not the Lone Ranger. He’s a bona fide Indian, doing what he’s doing to try to revenge an earlier, childhood unanticipated betrayal, and quite aware and part of “the old traditions.” He’s smarter than the Lone Ranger, who’s a newly returned law school graduate arriving as sort of a district attorney. The stereotypes are played with — of Westerns, of the TV show, and mainly of our expectations. It ways, it could be a Mel Brooks film — lots of “bits” connected by a very thin plot. Much of it is laugh out loud (some echoes for me of Django Unchained without the violence).

A trip, especially for those with Rossini, silver bullets, kimo sabe, and hi yo silver echoing in our heads. See it, you’ll enjoy it and laugh a lot.

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Dashing: 12 August @ Seattle Reign FC

Posted on August 13, 2015 by Daniel (@MKNN)

{Another one watched on the stream. No issues there, and the images seemed cleaner than usual, don’t know if that is part of the Reign’s sponsor’s involvement–Bootstrapper Studios–or not. Props to their announcing crew as well, although the camera work was a bit rough throughout.}

Bottom line here is that the better team on the night won, with the Reign–especially in the second half–dominating much of the contest. It’s always hard to figure these things out from a single game, but I was very impressed with what I saw as Laura Harvey‘s coaching influence on the Seattle team. This loss just about dooms the Dash’s playoff push, although there are technically enough games left for them to catch the Spirit for the final slot.

Writeups on what happened can be found at Dynamo Theory, Keeper Notes, and elsewhere–as usual, I’ll try to focus more on the tactical/evaluative than the game narrative.

#THEGOOD

Positionally, Rachael Axon was very good in the holding role. She was rarely caught out, and her anchor allowed all three of our deep midfielders–who are all more in the mold of Andrea Pirlo than Nemanja Matić–to venture forward at will. That role is key for the Dash, and while I like Axon, I do think it is one that could see an upgrade for next season.

Along the same lines, the combination of Keelin Winters and Jess Fishlock was fantastic for Seattle. It’s a different role when you have two deep midfielders playing side-by-side (tactically, the Dash lined up in more of a 4-1-3-2 and the Reign in a 4-2-um, 4-2-something: Megan Rapinoe, being made of awesome, defies all tactical alignments), but watching Fishlock and Winters combine with Rachel Corsie and Lauren Barnes to shut down the deep middle of the park was fantastic. It was textbook: the DC’s would spread themselves to either channel and Winters would drop into a shallow triangle between them, and the Reign were able to easily transition the ball into midfield and attack either by going wide to Stephanie Cox or Kendall Fletcher on the flanks or by working with Winters, Fishlock, and the effervescent Kim Little through the middle.

Morgan Brian may have had her best game of the year. She played a more attacking, positive role, and her deepest strength–the magnets that attach the ball to her feet in close quarters–was on fine display.

I do love me some front-line flexibility. For Seattle, Rapinoe was all over the place–both flanks and central, and had a typically inventive and hard-working game and Kealia Ohai was consistently found on both the left and right flanks. Rapinoe is actually a decent comparison for Ohai: Ohai is faster and more direct and Rapinoe is more creative and unpredictable/impulsive. In this game, Ohai scored (a goal, btw, that was the epitome of placement over power), and her runs to the endline were trouble for the Reign all night, but I think Rapinoe had the greater impact on the game for her team, despite her lack of scoresheet stats.

This is really neither #GOOD or #UNGOOD, but it was, for me, the key tactical choice of the match. Houston packed the box defensively, often drawing the fullbacks in, and pulling back both Axon and one of the upfield trio. This worked very well to help negate Little and Rapinoe (although both got free inside the 18 at least once), but it gave up massive amounts of space on the wings. OK, fine, you have to believe Randy Waldrum knew that would happen, right? What I don’t know if he anticipated was just how *good* Seattle was at exploiting that. Time and time again, Seattle would deliver deep, cross-field passes that were nearly perfectly on target and quickly brought under control, whether to Beverly Yanez on the right wing, or one of the fullbacks pushing up, or to Rapinoe. It was a clinic in one side taking, and effectively exploiting, what the other team was willing to give.

This tactical choice is linked to some amazing recovery runs by the Dash throughout the game, most notably a thirty yard sprint by Ella Masar to catch back up with Rapinoe and knock away a clear one-on-one opportunity. The Dash have the ability to make those runs, which is great, but the need for them is a product of being too easily caught out by fairly direct play.

Camila. That’s right. Camila in #THEGOOD. As a late substitute, she had tons of energy and danger in her runs and had as many threatening touches in her few dozen minutes as Carli Lloyd did all game (see below).

#THEUNGOOD

Paralleling the above, Axon doesn’t offer much other than her “Destroyer Mode.” This can lead to the Dash being caught out when none of the other three midfielders are available for clean, simple outlet passes.

Andressa was … fine. Fine equals #UNGOOD here, given how positively impactful she can be. She was part of a wider, troubling tendency for the Dash: they played a lot of one-touch soccer, nicely intricate 1-2’s. So why is this in the #UNGOOD? Because way, way, way too many of those didn’t come off: the second pass of the 1-2 was into space or slightly off target, or, much worse, directly to a Reign player. The ideas were all good, and that’s fine for a youth team. If you want to make the playoffs, you have to execute those ideas. Primary culprits here were Andressa and Lloyd.

Speaking of whom … Lloyd was essentially a non-factor. Seattle tracked her well all night, but she also made very little hay when given her opportunities, taking too long on the ball and not seeming very comfortable as part of the trio. One would hope that both of these issues are worked out in practice over the next week, before the rematch with the Reign in Houston next week.

The tying goal was a shambolic affair. First, Andressa gave the ball up and then just sort of moped in place, along with a teammate or two. So, there was a real failure in transition for the Dash that led to the Reign’s attack having the advantage; then Erin McLeod got decent contact on the ball, but it spun quite nicely (from a Reign point of view) into Mathias’ path; then, there was a pretty clear handball (armball?) as Mathias got the ball under control before slotting it home. But it all went back to the failure in transition from offense to defense, something that seems to plague the Dash somewhat constantly.

At the same time, the Dash were lucky to escape a collision in the box between Ohai and Little without being called for a foul and penalty. So, even if I would dispute how the Reign tied the game, a 1-1 score at halftime–and a loss at the end of 90 minutes–reflects the game pretty well.

#FAVES

My favorite moment was watching Meghan Klingenberg use a fantastic bit of skill to keep the ball in play along the left touchline late in the first half. Everyone–including Laura Harvey–assumed the ball was headed out of bounds (and Harvey had already begun to raise her hand to signal a throw-in) when Kling did her thing. WANT GIF!

Second favorite was the announcer describing the Reign bringing on Elli Reed as a defensive substitution. Reed is defensive in the same way that Caitlin Foord is, which is to say, not very much at all …

 

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Soccermetrics: An Opening Salvo

Posted on August 11, 2015 by Daniel (@MKNN)

{This is the first in what I think will be occasional discussions of trying to analyze soccer. There’s a lot here, and a lot churning in my head about it, but this piece tries to lay out some of the initial context, drawing on my own somewhat deep engagement with the early decades of sabermetrics. Like a lot of what I write, it feels too long for your usual internet content. Sorry about that.}

I’ve been here before.

I have fond memories of the old Baseball Abstracts, almost amateurishly published in softcover by Bill James in the 1980s. I remember laughing out loud at them: James never got enough credit for his humor. I remember the sense of helplessness as he showed that his beloved Frank White was indeed a better second baseman than my beloved Willie Randolph.

Most of all, I remember the sense of excitement that accompanied the growing understanding that new knowledge was being produced, that something was changing. Seen globally, trying to make sense of baseball is a small thing, but that constrained universe was undergoing a sea change.

Baseball, though, was lucky. It was lucky in a lot of ways, but a few stand out

First, the game has always been a long succession of one-on-one confrontations. Yes, those batter versus pitcher moments only exist in the context of inning and score and runners on base and (perhaps most importantly for later analytic conundrums) defensive positioning. But the batter – pitcher relationship remains the window through which the game was most easily seen.

Second, baseball generated legitimate sample sizes without even trying: hundreds of at-bats, thousands of pitches; things that helped, just by their nature, to overwhelm popular misunderstandings of and downright resistance to things like standard deviation. It remains nearly impossible for a bad hitter to amass 200 hits in a season or a great hitter (when healthy) not to manage 100 over the course of 140 games. As importantly, 150+ games gives enough time for good teams to show they were good and bad teams to show they were bad. Teams over- and under-perform, of course, but it is very hard to be a bad team and finish with a .600 winning percentage. (For some related info, this recent piece at fivethirtyeight talks about how remarkable it is for teams this year to be likely to outperform their predictions by about .050 in winning percentage.

Third, baseball, from the very beginning, counted a great many things and a great many of those were the right things. Yes, batting average turned out, after eighty years of worship, to be a false god. But at bats still mattered; hits still mattered; and there were relationships between the things that counted and the thing that kept score (runs).

All of that built a very solid platform. And once the box was open, we rushed in to grab whatever we could. At first, of course, much of it was the wild flailing of the newly converted. I know, let’s ADD slugging percentage to on base percentage. No, wait, lets MULTIPLY them. Wait, what if we subtracted home runs from stolen bases and converted that into … nah, let’s just go back to on base percentage.

Over time, of course, real math won out and we all scurried to our spreadsheets only to find that actual mathematicians had taken over. Phrases like “normalized for park effects” became popular, as did the never-ending debate about replacement value.

The end result is that we *understand* more about baseball than we ever have before. And yet, note, the game has lost none of its appeal, none of its ability to surprise (2015 Kansas City Royals and Houston Astros, I’m looking at you). Our understanding exists in its best form in hindsight: we can tell you what contributed to the performance of a player or team, but the crystal ball is only slightly less cloudy than it was before when looking ahead.

So, now, to soccer.

There is a thirst to bring analytics to the game, and every other blog post on it talks about “the Moneyball of football.” But it’s a very different world. Revisiting the three points above:

First, outside of penalty kicks, which are skewed heavily towards a single outcome, soccer has almost no isolated moments of player versus player. Everything happens in flux: even the newly minted “take-on” exists only within the context of a team movement, where the position of the rest of the players, more often than not, is a contributing factor to the unfolding play (whether from a breakaway following action at the other end of the field or from a team intentionally trying to isolate a player on the wing). There are arguments against this: set pieces, some individual dribble attempts, things like that. But nothing that exists predictably and regularly, minute after minute, game after game.

Second, the most important thing in soccer occurs incredibly rarely. A single game may contain hundreds of touches of the ball, but only a single goal. Getting the ball into the back of the net seems to have some relationship to those hundreds of touches, but it’s not very clear what that might be, exactly. This is the core of the blurring of the game that occurs when you put on analytical goggles.

Third, and closely Related: we sort of intuitively know that counting goals is insufficient. So we’ve rushed into a mode of counting anything we can think of, and most of it is utter rubbish. What are you likely to see  as match statistics? Distance run. Possession, but without context (and with match announcers making hay out of a 53 to 47% edge, which is most likely pure statistical noise). Shots on target (don’t get me started: the wickedly knuckling ball that has the GK beat, but slides eighteen inches wide is “off target,” while the weak header that loops comfortably into his arms is “on target”). We’re counting just to count, and while in baseball there were enough options to make it all worthwhile, here … well … no wonder anoraks get a bad name.

It’s an exciting time: the attention being paid to the game (and, of course, the amount of money at stake) is sure to produce similar advances in our understanding of it to that of baseball between now and three to four decades ago. But we’re a long, long way off right now. And I would claim that the structure of soccer: the complex interactions, the importance of the elusive concept of space, the wide variety of tactical approaches to the game–all conspire to make the question of analytics stunningly complicated.

To heck with complicated: it’s maddening: possession is meaningless when it takes fewer than five seconds for the other side to score; most games are ninety minutes of which the ball is in play fewer than sixty-five, of which the ball is in meaningful play fewer than twenty.

The problem is that most of the information we have might be illuminating, but it falls far short of helping us figure out what players are contributing to a team winning. And without that, it’s all conjecture and visual impression and subtle prejudices shining through.

There is statistical analysis that does a fantastic job of confirming the outliers. These pieces on Lionel Messi, for example, are stunning (especially the first one, go read it now if you haven’t, seriously). But if you want to figure out if Juan Mata is more or less valuable than David Silva to their clubs, it’s awfully difficult. And if you want to compare César Azpilicueta to Romelu Lukaku, you really have no way of even starting the conversation, not if you want it grounded in more than hazy opinions that get repeated often enough to be held as fact.

One more vital difference from baseball: the study of baseball was built on freely available information sources. Soccermetrics has grown at a time where information has already been commodified, and it may very well be that Opta has a huge wealth of data that would support an explosion in the analytics of the sport, but are only opening up their trove for the deep wallets of top-tier teams.

I suspect not, however. I suspect that instead, the game remains resistant to being easily solved, and requires a different set of approaches, something that factors in multiple chains of events with multiple points of inflection. This will, I think, contribute to it remaining elusive: simple ratios and simple counts are unlikely to get us there, which makes the insight into the data more difficult.

Most importantly, it also makes the dissemination and explanation of the data more challenging, as there are few in the soccerverse willing to “just accept” some new version of WinShares without peering under the hood.

Onwards into the fog!

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@The Movies with PopPop: Winter Sleep

Posted on August 2, 2015 by Daniel (@MKNN)

Winter Sleep is a first rate 2014 Turkish film directed by Nuri Bilge Ceylan, (also directed 2011’s Once Upon a Time in Anatolia which I remember seeing and enjoying), loosely adapted from the Chekhov short story The Wife.

The film focuses on a handful of people: Aydin, a former actor who lives in Cappadocia (yes, you Turkish travelers, it’ll look quite familiar), runs a small hotel and also collects rents from some homes inherited from his father; his young wife Nihal who is struggling to provide some independence to her life; his sister Necla, a recent divorcee. suffering from terminal boredom and self pity; and Hamdi, Ismail, and Ilyas, members of a tenant family, respectively the village Iman, his older and unemployed brother, and Ismail’s 7 year old son. There are also a couple of friends, a school teacher, and Aydin’s business manager Hidayet.

The film is essentially a series of dialogues with Aydin a participant in most of them. Each identifies and then expands on the conflicts between him and each of the other main characters, with each exchange deepening in perception and nastiness, and each character, while speaking what we recognize as truth about the other, also twisting the knife.

Aydin is the wealthiest, or one of the wealthiest, people in the area. He writes columns for a small local paper, extolling virtue, principle, obligation to the environment, human kindness, and more — yet his human interactions, style and highhanded interventions reflect little of that. And of course, he has Hidayet do all his dirty work so he can claim ignorance and non-involvement.

The arc of the movie leads to some understanding on his part, along with much ambiguity as to whether, how much and with what impact things are actually likely to change.

The obvious echoes are Chekhovian; somehow it also reminded me of some of Bergman (huh?).

The movie is long — a bit over 3 hours, but worth if not every minute of it, let’s say all but maybe 10 minutes!

A fascinating movie if you appreciate smart dialogue, human insightfulness, and that wonderful Cappadocian landscape!

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Dashing: 29 July v FC Kansas City

Posted on July 30, 2015 by Daniel (@MKNN)

{Watched this over the Fox Stream which, after a rough start with their game a few days ago, was pretty stable until about halfway through the second half. However, the Fox Stream (at least through the website) does not allow rewinds. Combine that with the general weakness of the replays and the lack of tactical depth to the commentary, and I was unable to verify the players involved in a few plays.}

This was, simply, the best game in Dash history, and one of the best in the short history of the NWSL. It had everything: strong debuts by new players, strong performances from established stars, a second half from a player who just announced her retirement, two comebacks, a tying goal with less than ten minutes to go, and a stunning strike to win it in the waning moments.

The Dash won 3-2, on an 85th minute wondergoal from Carli Lloyd. FC KC had taken a very quick 1-0 lead, only to see the Dash score twice to lead 2-1 for most of the game before a tying goal with about 10 minutes left set the stage for Lloyd.

But, if you’re reading this, you probably know all that. So I’m going to try to keep the focus on the tactical and the analytical, but forgive me if I go all fanboy at times. This really was a great game.

#THE GOOD

The game certainly started well: at kickoff, the Fox graphic showed Houston up 1-0. It was nice of the network to spot us a goal, but it unfortunately wasn’t accurate or predictive.

Lauren Holiday was her usual dependable, influential self. Her goal itself was a bit lucky (a shot from distance that took a deflection from Ellie Brush before nestling inside the post), it was setup by a fantastic pass that set Amy Rodriguez free behind the Houston back line.

The debutante was Andressa, who slid directly into the starting lineup, forming a midfield trio with Morgan Brian and Lloyd. Andressa had a very solid first game, especially considering she only had a single practice session with her new team. There were moments where there was clear confusion between the three of them as to who should hold back and who should press forward, but that was offset by the Brazilian’s ability to retain possession, the fantastic touch on her passes, and her ability to move the ball on either through crosses into the box or raking vertical passes.

The Dash are not, historically, a great offensive team, and being down a goal early was troubling. The team responded as well as they ever have: Brush tied the score on an impressive side-volley (for her first NWSL goal) and Jessica McDonald gave the Dash the lead from a blistering run and strong finish.

Both goals are worth breaking apart a little to learn some more about the team. The first came when a deflection rolled towards the corner. Kealia Ohai, instead of letting the ball spin out of bounds, chased it down, setting herself up for a first touch cross, which found Brush alone between the penalty spot and the edge of the box. It was a lucky shot: Brush is athletic, but her success rate on taking balls out of the air with well-placed volleys won’t be fantastic over an entire season. But the shot only existed because Ohai, who was tireless as usual, made the hustle play.

Ohai was on the right for most of the first half (although the Dash did their usual thing in allowing all three forwards, plus Lloyd, to rotate regularly through the attacking positions), and most of the Dash build up was a product of her work combining with Ella Masar and Andressa, or Melissa Henderson doing the same when Ohai moved more centrally.

But the team was more balanced than they have been at times, and McDonald’s goal was an attack down the left channel, where she was able to use her athleticism to get past Lee Ann Robinson (I think–it may have been Becca Moros, but I think it was Robinson) and then remained fully composed in beating Nicole Barnhart from close range.

It’s so hard to put this under THE GOOD, but it was: this game was the final home appearance of the #NCE, with Niki Cross having announced her retirement earlier in the day. Cross came on at halftime for Brian, and instantly the issues from the first half were addressed: with Cross as the holder, both Andressa and Lloyd knew exactly what their role was, and with the safety net of Cross behind them, both players roamed forward more effectively.

Finally, at a point where it looked more likely the Dash would lose 3-2 instead of win, up stepped Lloyd. It was an odd sequence: Cross missed a pass, but it fell to (I believe) Andressa, who touched it back to Cross. Perhaps making up for the initial miss, Cross nutmegged the FCKC defender to free Lloyd into space. The initial touches had drawn the defense slightly to the right which left a gap for Lloyd to step into. She looked up, saw the space and the goal, got her stride right, and sent a laser of a shot into the upper left corner. The Vine of the shot has 90K views, and the shot is fantastic, but I would urge you to look at the footwork–the slightly longer penultimate stride that gets her perfectly positioned to nail the shot. She’s, um, quite good.

#THE UNGOOD

FC Kansas City’s opening goal was a big red flag: in the meeting between these teams nine days ago, it was Heather O’Reilly that kept slipping into space on the right flank; here, while O’Reilly was largely contained, it looked like Rodriguez was getting behind Brush and Toni Pressley with far too much ease.

Between the two goals, the Dash were exposed defensively: Erika Tymrak, who was a constant threat from distance, missed by a few feet and then Rodriguez was again all alone in space. In both of these instances, the culprit was Lloyd, or more accurately, the communication between Brian and Andressa. Here’s what I mean: the Dash can’t ever (or, very rarely) leave Lloyd as the bottom point of their midfield triangle. Lloyd is a fantastic player, and certainly has an argument of the best player in the world right now (seven games straight with a goal, including four in the World Cup). But her greatness is at the other end of the field, and while her defensive effort is there, the awareness and skill lags behind.

That makes it critical that whomever the Dash have in midfield are aware enough to either stay back with her (making a triangle with a wide base, dangerous on the counter as each midfielder is an outlet for the other), or to stay back instead of her. Both Brian and Andressa have the ability to do that, and I would expect this to be shored up as the trio plays together more.

While the #NCE was good (see above), it also contributed to the Dash being constantly on the back foot in much of the second half. Cross naturally drops deep, just in front of the two central defenders, which welcomes pressure. It’s a difficult judgement to make: if the holding midfielder steps up, the risk goes up of what happens if she gets beat; if they drop deep, you face a lot of possession in your own half, which is what happened.

The equalizer for FC Kansas City was a product of a mediocre clearing header from Brush (yeah, it was an up and down game for her). She cleared the ball, but it didn’t go as far as he would have liked, and the ensuing shot rebounded off the post and directly to the feet of  Sarah Hagen, who calmly buried what amounted to little more than pass into the back of an open net.

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Traiting Places: A Writing Trick that Worked for Me

Posted on July 28, 2015 by Daniel (@MKNN)

Section three of In Time has been the longest, sloggiest sloggy slog I’ve ever worked through. That includes the interminable chapter of my thesis that lasted over a year (at least there I was actively, consciously, and quite effectively avoiding the writing).

When my wonderful critique group read section one, part of their feedback was that it all went a bit too slowly, that just when our human protagonist was on the verge of decisive action, he drowned himself in alcohol, and the whole thing was less than electric.

Now, becoming intentionally and insanely drunk seems a perfectly rational response to his situation, lost in a world he doesn’t understand and all. But, I was worried, largely because section three included more drinking. A lot more drinking. Drinking as an intentional dodge of making a choice or doing anything or even knowing what day it was.

Clearly, that wouldn’t do.

So I took the other main character–the one that was encouraging and enabling the drinking–and made him a teetotaller.

And something happened.

I can’t say that it was magical or immediately made all the writing easy and smooth or anything like that. But taking what was a dominant, defining character trait and turning it on its head began to reveal a totally different way of being for the character and additional levels of interaction between the two of them. It helped to slowly create some solid ground, some traction in the slog.

This opened my eyes to the possibilities contained in reversing a character before they are fully formed. I don’t know how this character will end up, and it may very well be that this writing was all a way to get out of a rut. But it also reminded me that the characters and the plot are in an eternal dance: neither is at the service of the other, and as an author there is high utility in dramatically changing the rhythm from time to time.

So, try it: next time you’re stuck, take a defining trait of one of your characters and reverse it. Write one and a half scenes with the new trait. I would bet that, at that point, you will either have momentum in a new direction, or additional depth you can use to help you get out of being stuck.

It’s not a perfect cure by any means: I’m still slogging. But the end is in sight, and at some point I may even be able to move on to section four.

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Dashing: 20 July @ FC Kansas City

Posted on July 21, 2015 by Daniel (@MKNN)

{This is my first game report written from watching an away game on the YouTube stream. It was a mixed bag: camera angles and announcers were subpar, but being able to rewind sure comes in handy. This game’s stream is available here.}

A game that was strikingly better in the second half than the first and that, overall, probably deserved the 1-1 result. Both teams had chances for the win–only the crossbar denied Amy Rodriguez‘ header after a pretty cross from Heather O’Reilly in the first half, and only a goalline clearance kept the Dash from taking the points in second half stoppage time.

#THE GOOD

Almost every time Carli Lloyd and Kealia Ohai have the ball with space between them and the back line, it’s worth stopping whatever you’re doing to watch. Those moments are full of attacking potential, and should continue to generate very good things for the Dash.

O’Reilly was a beast, with the player of the match award going, for me, to either her or Lauren Holiday. O’Reilly’s speed and tenacity and refusal to take a single run off made her a constant threat to the Dash back line, especially down the right flank at the start of the game, and complimented the touch, composure, and blasts from distance provided by Holiday. Those two were involved with at least a touch in almost every FKC attack. It’s amazing O’Reilly couldn’t get a game–and probably properly so–with the USWNT. That is one deep national team!

Erin McLeod really deserves to be in the conversation of the world’s best goalkeeper right now. She was again fantastic: aggressive and cat-quick both vertically and horizontally.

Morgan Brian is so impressive in possession. It’s part of what often goes unnoticed, but she just controls the ball so well in tight spaces, moving her body around it to shield off the defender, finding the angle where the touch is available. But, see below …

Likewise, yes, Camila had a good enough first half, restored to a wide midfield role. Much more comfortable, a good outlet for the defense, very good at drawing fouls in dangerous positions. But, see below …

Dash coach Randy Waldrum continues to provide one of the most flexible, dynamic front lines you could ever see. Especially in the second half, when Jessica McDonald came in for a gassed Meghan Klingenberg, there were now four players rotating freely up front, five when Brian joined in as the Dash pushed for a late winner. It’s a great contrast between the discipline of the back line and the freedom of the front, but it demands a huge amount from the deep lying midfielders to keep the two parts of the team balanced and connected.

This game saw the death (hopefully temporarily) of the #NCE. There was much mourning, as Jordan Jackson was preferred to Niki Cross in the holding role for this game. This led to a different shape at the back: the #NCE often created a shallow triangle, with Cross just in front of the two DC’s; here, especially in the first half, Klingenberg, Jackson, and Ella Masar were in a line in front of the DC’s, making it a back five with two wingbacks. This is sad, but it is in the GOOD section, because Jackson was quite good throughout, holding the space behind Brian in the first half and scrambling desperately to cover for Camila in the second.

You could use a lot of this game as a primer on how to play DC. Both Toni Pressley and Becky Sauerbrunn had very strong games, especially in reading what was in front of them, and attacking passes, intercepting them, and carrying forward into space. Yes, Pressley had the OG, but such things happen: it was a pinball effect on a hard cross, and there’s not a lot she could do. (Pressley also got some criticism in the second half, but every time if you re-watched it, she was put in a really poor position by the lack of a Dash defender on the left … you know this tune, see below.) It was especially impressive watching Sauerbrunn, who took on the pressing role Julie Johnston played at the WC, and did fantastically, showing more versatility than I had credited her with previously.

#THE UNGOOD

Morgan Brian’s first fifteen minutes were pretty rough–she gave the ball away directly from the opening kickoff, and then was highly ineffective in the passing game, which is a requirement for her role. She improved as the game wore on, and even sent a lovely diagonal ball to free Ohai on the wing in the second half, but the first half performance was troubling.

Kansas City deserves a real stadium. It’s cute and quaint to see the people strolling around the field, but there’s little to differentiate it from a high-end U18 club team’s facilities. That’s a sad state of affairs for the town claiming to be the center of American soccer fandom.

And, yeah, we have our usual report on Camila. There are two points here. The first is that, while she was better in midfield, she still has to improve her passing game: too often, her balls would find where Lloyd or Ohai or Tiffany McCarty are, not where they will be, and her teammate would have to slow down, or even retreat, to receive the ball. But that can be improved upon. The bigger issue is the same one we’ve seen before: when McDonald came on, Camila moved back to her spot at left back. The very next KC attack was an all too familiar sight: the DMC (Jackson in this case) chasing down a player charging down Camila’s flank while she trailed behind ineffectively. Moments later, Rodriguez again left her well behind, with little evidence of Camila’s desire to scramble back into position. And then, there she was again, getting nowhere near O’Reilly before she sent a cross that Rodriguez was wide open to receive on the far post. It’s troubling that either the Dash don’t have a better option out there (which can’t be true: I’m looking at you, Melissa Henderson, Carleigh Williams) or that Coach W doesn’t see how weak Camila is defensively.

Dynamo Theory writeup here.

 

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Talking Points: First in a Series

Posted on July 19, 2015 by Daniel (@MKNN)

{I don’t know how frequently these will pop up. But I’ve always wanted to find a way to poke at my relationship with my stutter, and to share it in case it was of use to anyone else. Not that enough people see this for it to matter now, but perhaps someday … the goal–at least the goal right now–is to capture some of the everyday impacts, the things that float by without notice. Writing about the dramatic–the time I gave myself a nosebleed from stuttering, the leaping off the bed to say a girl’s name to ask her out, the moments of public panic–is fine, but those are moments that are harder to interpret: they become stories, not just part of the mundane movement of life. So …}

We’re at the Houston Arboretum, one of our favorite places to go and walk with Messi on the weekends. If you are actually viewing this on the web, and hit refresh often enough, you’ll see him in the banner, seeming to smile with his tongue lolling out. A note about Messi: he’s one of those dogs, the rare kind that never snaps, never bites, is absolutely phenomenal around kids. The kind where you could lay a steaming piece of meat on the floor in front of him, and he won’t move for it until you give him permission. It borders on the bizarre.

Back to the arboretum.

A family appears in front of us on the path, and the mother reaches protectively towards her young boy, who can’t be more than four. His eyes light up at the sight of our dog, but his body arches towards his mother’s legs.

I smile at them and say, “It’s all right.”

And then time does that weird thing it does multiple times a day when my brain is moving faster than anything else can happen, and I hear the words I want to say in my head, he’s a lover, not a fighter, but I know right away that I’ll stutter on the l and that there’s nothing I can do at the moment to keep that from happening and I evaluate the interaction, my desire to put them at ease with the knowledge that the noises that will come out of my mouth combined with the awkward grimace that will accompany them will most likely do the opposite and I make the call that is the easiest in the moment to not say anything else or to say something else but not what I meant to say or to just smile and make a noise to Messi and to move on and it’s all over faster than you think and they certainly aren’t aware that anything untoward happened, but I am, I am, I am aware of the loss of a moment.

A moment of possible connection, a shared smile, perhaps even the boy being able to run a hand tentatively along the smoothness of Messi’s pewter fur while he panted patiently. A moment lost, because I stutter, and because despite knowing how to manage and control my stutter, I constantly make the choice not to–it’s incredibly wearisome to manage your speech, to work so hard at something that is supposed to be natural, in the moment, easy.

Instead, this moment–sun dappling the path in front of us, sweat trickling gently down my back from the Houston summer, the sound of cicada’s droning in the distance, the weight of Messi’s leash moving gently in my hand–becomes one moment out of many each week where something that would be the better thing to say, the funnier thing, the thing with better timing, the thing that would set people more at ease, the thing I wish I could say, remains unsaid.

That’s not quite right. It is said, but only in my mind, and then rejected. So it is said, and it leaves behind the shadow of the decision not to say it out loud, and that shadow lingers, sometimes briefly and sometimes not, but always for a little while.

When I read David Mitchell’s Black Swan Green (which will be the subject of a Reading Well at some point), I was intensely eager to see how he described his own experience of stuttering. It seemed a disappointment: the things that rang true were the obvious (social isolation, the intense need to develop a wide vocabulary so plenty of synonyms were always at hand for word substitutions, the easy target that it gave the bullies of our youth), but it seems that every stutterer’s experience may be unique. Given how pervasive it is, perhaps this is unsurprising, perhaps having something so basic as speech impacted this way naturally leads to a multitude of expressions, each woven so tightly into the context of a specific life that they are easily recognized at a distance, but blur into separate threads the closer you examine them.

I know people who have structured their entire lives around not speaking. And then I look at my own: radio show host, loudmouth in and out of class, occasional actor, teacher in many contexts including professor, leader, etc. To mangle one of the most mangled quotes ever:

All fluent people are alike in their fluency; every stutterer is disfluent in their own unique way.

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