Tag: Soccer

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Thailand coach Peter Reid: the saga continues

Has Peter Reid, the Thailand national soccer team coach, left to join English Premier League outfit Stoke City as an assistant? Or is Reid still managing Thailand? Or is he doing both?

BBC Sport had this item yesterday, written as if Reid officially joined Stoke City last month, which may well be the case:

Stoke City’s Mark O’Connor believes the experience of his colleagues, Peter Reid and Gerry Francis, can help him improve as a first-team coach.

Francis have been coaching at Stoke since October, while Reid joined the Potters as assistant manager in August.

Meanwhile, the president of the Football Association of Thailand (FAT), Worawi Makudi, has told the Bangkok Post (see below) that Reid will continue at Stoke City for two more weeks. But it’s unclear whether Reid will resume coaching Thailand full-time after that.

For context, previous posts on the matter are here (Aug. 31) and here (Aug. 28).

The Bangkok Post‘s soccer expert, Tor Chittinand, has this piece in today’s paper:

“Worawi Makudi, president of the Football Association of Thailand (FAT), met Peter Reid in Manchester to discuss whether he wanted to remain as Thailand’s national team coach.

English Premier League chairman Sir David Richards was also there and Worawi said Reid wanted to continue as Thailand’s coach.

The meeting was called after it was apparent that Reid was working at Stoke as assistant to club manager Tony Pulis.

I thought the matter was over but the saga is far from at an end.

Worawi said after returning from England yesterday that Reid had asked for permission to help Pulis for another two weeks.

Regardless of whether the former Sunderland coach comes back or not, he has lost several friends and made a number of enemies in Thailand.

A strange affair indeed.

UPDATE: The Nation is reporting that the FAT have fired Reid. Story — though the wording is unclear — is here.

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Thailand coach Peter Reid: staying put?

More on the confusion surrounding Thailand soccer coach Peter Reid’s potential move to EPL outfit Stoke City. Today’s Bangkok Post has this item:

Peter Reid will continue as the national team coach, according to Football Association of Thailand (FAT) president Worawi Makudi.

Worawi’s statement came after he met the Englishman at a Thai restaurant in Manchester on Saturday night.

English Premeir League chairman Sir David Richards, who introduced Reid to Worawi, was also at the meeting.

Worawi and Reid shook hands in front of Thai journalists to signal an end to the will-he-stay-or-go saga.

“Everything has become clear. We have reached a conclusion that Reid will remain as Thailand’s coach. He is likely to return to Thailand this week,” Worawi told England-based Thai reporters.

Reid worked as assistant to Stoke City manager Tony Pulis last week but Worawi said this was not a serious matter because Reid had asked for his permission.

“He did not sign a contract with Stoke,” said Worawi.

“He just helped his friend. He cannot go anywhere at the moment because he is still under contract with the FAT.”

Once again, stay tuned…

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Around the web: August 25th to August 30th

Some links that have caught my eye of late:

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Confusion over Thailand coach Peter Reid

Many foreign news organizations are reporting that Peter Reid, who has coached Thailand’s national soccer team for the past year, is leaving to take the assistant’s job at English Premier League outfit Stoke City. ((If you’re wondering where Stoke is located, consult this handy map of English Premier League teams that I mentioned earlier.))

Here are stories from BBC Sport (“Reid content with assistant role”) and PA (“Reid claims agreement over Stoke move”). And there’s this ESPN Soccernet piece (“Reid ready for back-seat role under Pulis at Stoke”), which cites quotes from Reid that ran on BBC Radio Stoke.

But today’s Bangkok Post has this story — “Worawi says Reid will stay”:

The Peter Reid saga continued yesterday when Thai football chief Worawi Makudi insisted that he will remain as Thailand’s national team coach.

Worawi, who is in England as guest of the English FA, said he had talked to the former Sunderland and Leeds manager who confirmed he will return to Thailand.

“I have talked to him on the phone and he says he wants to continue as Thailand’s coach,” said the president of the Football Association of Thailand (FAT).

Reid, 53, has been quoted as saying in the English media that he is leaving Thailand and will become Stoke City manager Tony Pulis’ assistant.

And:

Worawi said he will meet Reid in Manchester tomorrow to get a clear-cut answer from him in person.

“I will ask him to make it clear. It will be an end to the confusing matter if he says he wants to continue coaching Thailand,” Worawi said.

“But if he wants to terminate the contract, then I can’t do anything.”

Stay tuned…

(Thanks to @bangkokbugle for the tip.)

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Health care reform, imagistic poetry, and Brazilian football shirts: what I’ve been reading

Here’s a round-up of some links that have caught my eye of late:

  • Steve Yelvington on the future of newspapers: “Stop the irrational negativity: Newspapers are not dead.” And don’t miss his post about local news sites: “The three primary roles your local website should play.” (Related Newley.com post about newspapers on online journalism here.)
  • The New York Times has a great story about an Italian tourist who recently ventured to Iraq: “Falluja’s Strange Visitor: A Western Tourist.”
  • My pal Austin Bush recently posted a dispatch and some images from the town of Mae Hong Son, in Thailand’s northwest: “Screw Provence.” (More on Mae Hong Son province here.)
  • The Run of Play is my new favorite soccer blog. (It’s written by Brian Phillips, who penned the Slate story about Masal Bugduv, which I mentioned recently.) Related, fun football link: BrazilName: Create your own Brazil football shirt
  • I read a lot of James Wright‘s poetry in college. And I thought of his imagistic work the other day and began consulting The G00g. This poem is one of my favorites: “Having Lost My Sons, I Confront the Wreckage of the Moon: Christmas, 1960.”
  • Atul Gawande in the New Yorker: “Getting There from Here: How should Obama reform health care?“
  • The WJS’s Weekend Journal Asia has a round-up of interesting Asia reads: “Asia’s Best Books: Our Top Picks of 2008.”
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The curious case of Masal Bugduv

Some snips from a very funny story in Slate by Brian Phillips: “Fictional Moldovan Soccer Phenom Tells All: Inside the ingenious hoax that fooled the British sports press.”

On a typical weekday, the English soccer press devotes itself to unsubstantiated rumors, manufactured scandals, and bikini pictures of players’ girlfriends (who seem to roam the earth together in a giant conjugal yacht, like the Beatles in Yellow Submarine). This week, however, thanks to an ingenious hoax that took in the Times of London, the soccer press has been engrossed by Moldova. Specifically by one Moldovan teenager, who is not, as it happens, a real person.

Earlier this month, the Times ran a feature called “Football’s Top 50 Rising Stars,” which featured at No. 30 a 16-year-old attacker named Masal Bugduv, whom the paper, never one to fear irony, described as “Moldova’s finest.” A bright future seemed to fill Bugduv’s windscreen. The young player had been “strongly linked,” the Times said, with a transfer to the London club Arsenal, had already earned a mention on the popular soccer news site Goal.com, spawned excitement in online forums, and been portrayed as something of a savior by the magazine When Saturday Comes, which introduced him as “one bright spot” amid Moldova’s nationalist strife.

And:

So, who was this clever hoaxer? Whoever engineered the prank left behind a calling card in the form of the fictional Moldovan newspaper Diario Mo Thon, described in one of the concocted AP stories as “the top sports daily in Balti.” Diario means diary in several Romance languages, and mo thón is Irish for my ass—just the kind of nested, polyglot ass pun that every good imaginary-Moldovan prank requires.

It got better. After SoccerLens blogger McDonnell broke the story, Bugduv fans in Ireland noticed that the player’s name was a phonetic twin for m’asal beag dubh, which is Irish for “my little black donkey.” A second Irish ass pun, sure. But “My Little Black Donkey” is also the name of an Irish-language short story by early 20th-century writer Pádraic Ó Conaire. And the story, about a man tricked into overpaying for a lazy donkey based on some vivid village gossip, can be read anachronistically as a parody of the culture of soccer transfers, in which the flaming rings of hype around a player—about how good he is, where he might go, how much a club might pay for him—often seem to overwhelm the minor matter of what he does on the pitch.

Thanks to A for the tip.

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Man U: Now sponsored by the US Fed

There was a time when it bothered me that most Americans don’t appreciate football (soccer). I love the game. I always have. Why, I wondered, doesn’t everyone in the US think it’s the Best Sport Ever Created?

These days, though, I’m not hung up on the issue. As Dave Eggers wrote in his contribution to the excellent book The Thinking Fan’s Guide to the World Cup, the game is doing just fine without America. Soccer doesn’t need the United States.

In an interesting twist, however, the US government has now effectively become the official sponsor of Manchester United, perhaps the world’s biggest and most successful soccer club.

How is that, you ask?

Well, in September, 2008, insurance behemoth AIG was given a US$85 billion bailout by the US federal reserve. AIG is Manchester United’s “principal sponsor,” and the AIG logo is emblazoned on the Man U shirt (see above). It’s a four-year deal in which AIG pays Manchester United US$102.9 million in total, or roughly US$25 million per year.

So, here’s some back of the envelope math: Man U pays Cristiano Ronaldo, 2008’s FIFA world player of the year, approximately US$9 million per year in wages as part of a five-year contract. So the AIG money — which now comes from what could be argued is essentially a nationalized US asset — represents almost three times Ronaldo’s yearly salary.

Who’d have seen that coming?

I might have to switch my allegiance from Arsenal to Man U. It would be the patriotic thing to do.

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Map of Premier League Teams

Speaking of soccer (football), if you enjoy the English Premier League but wonder where some of the more obscure teams are located, check out this helpful map. While most non-British fans know which teams are in London and which are in Liverpool and Manchester, fewer are familiar with the locations of teams like Stoke City, West Bromwich Albion, and Hull City.

You can find more geographic/sporting goodness ((Other leagues that are mapped out here include various soccer leagues, the US’s big four — MLB, NBA, NFL, and NHL — as well as…the European Poker Tour.)) on the Sport Map World home page.

(Link via my college teammate Danny S. at The New York Fitness Institute blog.)

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“Goalkeeper Science” in the NYT’s 2008 Year in Ideas

As I may have mentioned in the past, I’ve been a soccer (football) goalkeeper since the age of 7. I can’t get enough of the game, and I absolutely love goalkeeping. (I still play regularly today.) ((A few of my favorite goalkeeper-related Web sites include The Glove Bag — an exceptional online community of goalkeepers — and the news blogs The Goalkeepers’ Union and JB Goalkeeping Blog. And if you’re seriously into the philosophy of goalkeeping, I recommend this manual: “The Art of Goalkeeping or The Seven Principles of the Masters.”)) So I was delighted to see that, according to the New York Times, one of 2008’s big ideas that begin with the letter “g” — along with topics like genopolics, gallons per mile, and the guaranteed retirement account — is goalkeeper science:

What’s the best way to stop a penalty kick? Do nothing: just stand in the center of the goal and don’t move.

That is the surprising conclusion of “Action Bias Among Elite Soccer Goalkeepers: The Case of Penalty Kicks,” a paper published by a team of Israeli scientists in Journal of Economic Psychology that attracted attention earlier this year. The academics analyzed 286 penalty kicks and found that 94 percent of the time the goalies dived to the right or the left — even though the chances of stopping the ball were highest when the goalie stayed in the center.

If that’s true, why do goalies almost always dive off to one side? Because, the academics theorized, the goalies are afraid of looking as if they’re doing nothing — and then missing the ball…

(To read the rest of the entry, visit the link above and then choose “g” in the navigation bar. Sadly, there’s no direct link.)

For more on this subject, I recommend this blog post: “The Rationality of Soccer Goalkeepers” ((Insert joke about all goalkeepers being necessarily — and perhaps genetically — irrational here.)) ((And if you want to see a photo of yours truly saving a penalty kick several years ago in Taiwan — and I apologize in advance for the tight goalkeeping pants, but it was cold and the pitch was terrible — click here.))

This study illustrates the tension between internal(subjective) and external (objective) rationality discussed in my last post: statistically speaking, as a rule for winning games, to jump is (externally) suboptimal; but given the social norm and the associated emotional feeling, jumping is (internally) rational.

(Hat tip to B.L. for the NYT link. Image credit: Flickr.)

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StateStats: Analyzing Google search patterns

Now that the airports have re-opened here in Thailand ((The latest news from Bangkok: The revered Thai King — the world’s longest reigning monarch — failed to deliver his annual birthday eve speech on Thursday. There was a huge amount of anticipation regarding his remarks, as he was expected to weigh in on the ongoing Bangkok protests. The King, who turned 81 yesterday, was apparently too ill to speak. And yesterday, exiled prime minster Thaksin Shinawatra’s ex-wife returned to the country. For an overview of the situation in Thailand, I suggest this recent AP story: “Travelers leave behind a Thailand still in crisis“)), I wanted to point out an intriguing tool: StateStats.

The site allows you to compare Google search patters for various US states; the terms are also linked with other demographic data ((But take the demographic info with a grain of salt. From the site: “Be careful drawing conclusions from this data. For example, the fact that walmart shows a moderate correlation with “Obesity” does not imply that people who search for ‘walmart’ are obese! It only means that states with a high obesity rate tend to have a high rate of users searching for walmart, and vice versa…”))

Some search terms that caught my eye include:

Thailand
Thailand (popular in Hawaii)
Thai cuisine (big on the west coast)

Food
In searching for Southern food, I noticed that fried chicken is a popular search term in the south, as is pecan pie. And it’s no surprise to note that South Carolina is the clear winner in searches for grits, shrimp and grits, and Frogmore stew ((Here’s more info on Frogmore Stew.)). On the other hand, vegan is a popular query in Oregon and Vermont.

Media and the Internet
The Wire is a popular search term in Maryland (the show is based in Baltimore), while Sopranos is big in New Jersey, New York, and surrounding states. Various Web/tech-related search terms, meanwhile, are especially popular in the West and in New York. Twitter is big in the Pacific region, in New England, and in Texas (though the more generic microblogging is huge in California, as is WordPress); Flickr is big on the West coast and in New York; and Tumblr is especially popular in New York.

Misc.
Other terms worth a look: Soccer is a popular term in the Northeast, North Carolina, Texas, and Washington, while Real Madrid and Barcelona are both popular terms in California and Virginia. And in other long-running football (soccer) derbies, Virginia is also prominent: check out River Plate and Boca Juniors.

Dogs are big in the south and mid-west, while cats are extremely popular in New Hampshire. Saab is also a popular term in New England, while Volvo is a popular query on both coasts.

Searches for some of the Andean nations reflect an interesting pattern: Bolivia is a popular term in Virginia and Florida, while Ecuador is big in New York and the mid-Atlantic. (New York is home to many Ecuadorian immigrants.)

And, last but not least, Newley (pictured above) is a popular search term in New York, Texas, and California. ((I suspect that these are not searches for newley.com, but for Anthony Newley. Or perhaps they’re misspellings of the adverb newly.))

(StateStats link via Kottke, where you can find a list of other revealing queries.)