Nah I’ll watch it on the box pal…will be in attendence at HQ alright for Galway in 2 weeks time.
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The discussion was about which sport was the most cerebral, but if you want to talk about physicality, association football requires true physicality - every battle for a header in the box carries the risk of a clash of heads or a broken nose etc, and there’s no padding or helmets. I’d also like to compare statistics about how far the average top level association football player runs compared to the average United Statesian footballer. I suspect there’s quite a large gap there. And association footballers also have to play far more games in a season.
Name me another field/team sport where two of the five greatest players (arguably two of the three greatest players) have been 5’5, please. The connection is obvious. What’s in your brain isn’t determined by your height. Association football provides opportunities for greatness for a player regardless of their physical stature to a degree that other field/team sports can’t. That means it focusses on cerebrality in the way other field/team sports don’t.
Not sure what that has to do with association football tactics.
The offside rule is more important in association football than it is in any other sport, certainly more important than in rugby, which is the only other major field sport I can think off that has an “offside” rule.
Again, you prove my Junior Cert comparison point. All United Statesian football plays start from a similar scenario where both teams line up against each other. Learning something by rote does not imply a high degree of cerebrality. Adapting and reacting within a fraction of a second does. Does deliberately throwing a ball out of bounds imply a high degree of cerebrality?
Players out of position in other sports are routinely bailed out by other players.
Every sport has tactical battles to some extent. Tactical battles in association football are generally of a higher level of sophistication as they involve two sets of 10 outfield players each playing as part of a unified system, and even goalkeepers are now quite important in outfield tactics. But within those unified wholes there is a very high degree of unpredictability which requires players to constantly mix things up and adapt to changing situations at pretty much all points during a game.
A point was made earlier about “instinct”. “Instinct” as displayed by the greatest players in association football requires levels of intelligence, adaptability, spatial awareness and anticipation that ordinary people could only dream of having. Instinct is thinking without even realising you’re thinking. These players can react almost automatically to any situation. And they almost always look like they have time to do so, because their thinking is on a higher plane.
Hurling and United Statesian football are largely made up of individual battles. Any sport that is largely made up of individual battles is quite low down in the tactical evolution scale. Rugby requires unified tactical systems but they are unified tactical systems of the World War I trench warfare type, except on a pitch.
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Theres no connection between small statured players and cerebral play. Bar you stating there is. Their height (closeness to the ball in a game that’s played on the ground) and quickness of feet is probably more of a decisive factor in a sport that isnt physical. Actually the fact that so many of the games greats are that small just shows that its a game biased towards players with low cebtre of gravity, balance, quick feet. Could a 6’5 250 pound player not succeed at soccer so?
This adaptability to play offensively and defensively makes english soccer different from American football. But no different from basketball, ice hockey, gaelic football or many other sports. In all of these, players have to work together as park of an intrictae system to defend, and in spoets where the ball or puck moves faster and under better control than a soccer ball. I see you ignored my point that soccer players are so bereft of tactics they will fake injury or fouls in order to gain it?
And you stating soccer has a high degree of unpredictability sounds great, but watch most soccer teams with the ball at midfield, theres a few options that can unfold, not a myriad of unforeseeable ones.
The offside rule in hockey or backcourt rule in basketball is just as restrictive as the soccer rule.
A clinical dismantling. Outstanding post.
You dont dare question a sport youve spent most of your life obsessing over. What a shock!
It doesn’t matter if you’re the most cerebral player in the world in basketball, rugby or, increasingly, Gaelic football and hurling, if you’re 5’5, you aren’t going to make it at the top level, and you’re certainly not going to become an all-time great, because these sports place a greater emphasis on physical stature than association football does.
Not really sure what your point about diving is vis-a-vis tactics and whether a sport has a cerebral nature or not.
Again, if you don’t think association football is physical, I’d suggest you’re not very familiar with the sport.
Hockey doesn’t have an offside rule. If you’re talking about ice hockey, I’m not really familiar enough with that sport to comment on it, as I only see any of it during the Winter Olympics - but it doesn’t strike me as a particularly cerebral sport.
The backcourt rule in basketball as well as the shot clock is a rule to ensure offensive play. It doesn’t define tactics to anywhere near the same degree that the offside rule does in association football - the nature of basketball and the scoring system it has is that teams will always have to attack if they want to win, and basketball has a small court, so that will always require 5 v 5 defence v attack. I’m not criticising basketball as I think it’s a great sport that requires some of the highest skill levels hat any sport does - it’s just that, barring a few rare exceptions, you also have to be tall to play it.
Does soccer not place an emphasis on balance, eye feet co ordination (purely physical attributes) and as i stated if so many of its greats are small, does that not show a bias in itself. How many soccer greats are over 6’5 and 200 pounds?
Yes i was on about ice hockey, very complicated and every decision is made at ligthening speed
Lets stay on topic here guys.
American Football is a shite sport…that apes across the country have sheepishly bought into.
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Balance and feet to eye co-ordination are not natural physical attributes, they’re things that have to be endlessly worked on and developed. If you don’t constantly work on them you won’t retain them to a high level.
But obviously smaller people will tend to find it easier to develop balance due to having a lower centre of gravity, that’s just the laws of nature and mechanics.
However the point is that no matter how tall or small you are, association football will have a position on the pitch to suit your natural physical attributes if you’re good enough. If you’re 6’5, you likely won’t be a tricky winger or an up and down full back, but you could be a goalkeeper, a central defender or a centre-forward.
But Zlatan Ibrahimovic is 6’4 or thereabouts and is one of the world’s top creative players.
You sound jealous
I wasn’t expecting to have the opportunity to see some ice hockey so soon after writing this post, but RTE 2 have delivered on that front.
Balance and feet to eye co-ordination are not natural physical attributes, they’re things that have to be endlessly worked on and developed. If you don’t constantly work on them you won’t retain them to a high level.
- they are to an extent natural, can’t be coached to an elite level into someone who patently lacs them
But obviously smaller people will tend to find it easier to develop balance due to having a lower centre of gravity, that’s just the laws of nature and mechanics.
- ie an innate advantage
However the point is that no matter how tall or small you are, association football will have a position on the pitch to suit your natural physical attributes if you’re good enough.
- as does rugby, basketball GAA etc
If you’re 6’5, you likely won’t be a tricky winger or an up and down full back, but you could be a goalkeeper, a central defender or a centre-forward.
- but you said one of the most commendable parts of soccer was that players who were 5’5 could not only play but become greats. is it not fairer to say that because of the low centres of gravity they actually enjoy a distinct advantage, and soccer has little place for someone who might be extremely powerful and athletic, but not a good runner and over 200 pounds at optimum weight.
as an aside, how do you quote parts of a quote back?
Terrorism has rocked this thread.
Through having a naturally elite level of hand to eye co-ordination and a high level of cerebrality.
It’s the greatest show on earth and the less intelligent members of society, that need sports explained to them, are seething with its rise in popularity.
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You said it mate…its a show.
Yes, the greatest on earth… Once you deal with that, you can begin to appreciate it. It’s not perfect, no sport is, but holding hurling up as some misty-eyed romantic past-time to make yourself out to be a real Irish man is some low level stuff and screams insecurity. You’re better than that ‘I’m a true Gael’ bollox… Anyway, real Irish men are Americans, and real Americans are Irish.
The thing about US football is that it requires media and corporate hype to make the “product”, the same sort of hype that others revile when it’s applied to sport in this part of the world - except that US football ramps that hype up to multiple higher levels than even Sky Sports can manage with the Premier League.
Without that hype there is no “product”. The NFL is the very definition of Americana and that’s why people buy into it - the cheerleaders, the Guns ‘N’ Roses music during breaks in play, the constant homage to the military, the off-field misdemeanours of players, the Superbowl half-time show, the notion that the NFL is a sort of acceptable safe space where men can indulge in a comic book version of politically incorrect unreconstructed masculinity (even though they’d never dream of playing the game), and the fact that it’s sort of ridiculous and sort of exotic and will never be played to any sort of high level outside the US - all this adds to the “product”.
If you stripped all that away from it, it wouldn’t have nearly the same appeal.
I’ve been a fair weather fan of the NFL since the late 1980s (I used to stay up for the first quarter of every Superbowl as a kid). There’s no doubt that the nature of the game can lead to exciting contests, particularly in the play-offs, and you can do worse things than look at the last hour of a close game at 11:00 on a Sunday night in December or January. There are no doubt elite athletes on show, but as a sport itself the skill levels required compared to other major field sports, certainly outside of the quarterback position, are rudimentary enough. Catch, run, hit. Even a lot of what a quarterback does is not that skilful, it’s just about dealing with pressure and about having nerve.
But the NFL itself and how it is the ultimate showcase for Americana is really the product as far as the viewer is concerned, not the actual sport. And interest also diminishes when the big teams such as San Francisco, Dallas, New York, New England, Green Bay, Pittsburgh etc aren’t involved. Non-NFL games don’t have much appeal to me at all, although one of my sporting bucket list ambitions is to sit on Tightwad Hill for a Berkeley V Stanford “Big Game”. But I probably wouldn’t bother my ass to go if I had a free corporate ticket to a college game at Croke Park and I was still living in Dublin.
I find that when US football is taken out of its natural habitat, it looks utterly ridiculous and its limitations are brutally shown up. If you ever chanced upon a Scottish Claymores game in the World League some years back, you couldn’t help but laugh at the ridiculousness of it all. I also find concepts like the now regular games in London a major turn-off and nothing but naked corporate greed - the game will never, ever be taken seriously as a participatory sport outside North America.
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It isnt a misty eyed past time to me though mate.
The sense of belonging you get from playing the game with your mates since you were 5/6 years of age all the way up can’t be compared to an American sport on the television on Sunday nights… that fellas now fall over.
You’re clutching at straws talking about the big show…its akin to WWE.
If you lived over their fair enough…the other 99% are on the back of the wagon though.