Week 5 – Picks

This weeks picks are all in and not one person was late.

So here are the weekly guesses from all.

Weekly Quotes

BE: “Had to go for a diplomatic draw, although one JE will probably still think that I’ve dissed his team.”
Good job BB doesn’t have a team in the Premier League because your picks have too many outside influences!

LJ: “I think the Hornets will suffer their first loss of the season but I’m hoping it wont happen.”
I am going to read this as you slowly becoming sympathetic to the Watford fan’s cause;however, I know as a fan of the mighty Reds you just want Mourinho to fail!

ME: “I have Watford to win because it’s your birthday and they undid Spuds so they can’t be all bad!”
Or maybe the Potato Chickens are worse than we want them to be!  Lots of away games but another loss make it look like it could be a typical Spurs year…..

AM: “Banana skins everywhere, not least at Vicarage Road! “
Are we going to park the Banana bus?

JE “City will win the league with 38 wins and 152 goals and no goals conceded according to me!”
I haven’t posted KMFE or BE’s pre-season predictions but that is not far off what KMFE predicted!

AA: “Land of the living, I have returned!”
Welcome back.  Keep picking the Wolves!

BB:”I have no idea what I am doing on this. I am afraid after 25 years working in football, I am more likely to forecast the temperature and flow in cubic metres of the Thames at Maidenhead than I am the correct score between hornets and devils”
Interesting.

This Weeks Factoids

Today, according to Twitter:

River flow and water temp this morning, 11.7m³/s and 15.24°C, wind is Gentle. River is NOT FLAGGED.

— Maidenhead Rowing (@MaidenheadRC) September 14, 2018

So how does that compare to a football?

Volume
The volume of a ball is approximately V=4/3*pi*r^3 if we ignore the fact that it’s not quite truly spherical and is actually a truncated icosahedron.  The size of a football is roughly 22 cm (8.65 inches) in diameter for a regulation size 5 ball. Rules state that a size 5 ball must be 68 to 70 cm in circumference.

So the volume a ball will displace is 5500 cubic cm which is about .0055 cubic meters.  I’m not sure that matters but anyway, the key is the area of the ball  which is roughly pi*r^2 or 400 cm squared.

Time
During a game we can assume the ball is travelling for approximately 100 minutes.  Now, if it’s at Old Trafford and United are behind it’s going to be closer to 105 but we’ll keep it simple.

Distance

This is tough so we’ll make some huge guesses.  Let’s start with 10km as the baseline as this is what the average distance a footballer runs.   Of course, it’s probably less if you’re Pogba, but we’re just base-lining here.  It’s also a lot less than cricket players run.

There are 10 players that are in the outfield for each team.  We’ll exclude the team managed by Pep who insists that there are 11 outfield players.

That’s 200 km.

Now I’m going to adjust for the fact that the ball is stationary during throw ins and other periods (like as much of the last 5 minutes as possible if Watford are hanging on to the lead).   That’s a 20% adjustment.

That’s 160 km.

Now we can add in the fact that not everyone spends the whole game with the ball at their feet.  Some teams love the long ball and some teams smack in a lot of long crosses.   Most goalkeepers will also occasionally kick the ball out of the box on a kick off.  So let’s factor in the long ball.

In the EPLabout 25% of passes are crosses (except anyone at Arsenal who is genetically programmed to pass the ball 10 feet back and forth – except Xhaka who passes it all the way back to the goalkeeper.   About 5% are considered long passes!  Get Fellaini in the box and bomb it!

So this takes 16 km for when the ball is not at the feet and adds about another 80 km for the long ball (I’m just estimating).

Finally let’s adjust for the fact that many players aren’t making decent runs and are moving with the ball.  So the movement of player can’t be considered cumulative and you we need a negative factor to reduce the overall distance of the ball.. and in the end we get a volume displacement of  something way less than the Thames.

It should also be noted that ball doesn’t maintain it’s shape and the integrity of the ball is often ruined leading to a loss of shape and suppleness that makes it “bobble” inexplicably whenever in the vicinity of players with inherent skill and dexterity, such as Zaha try to control the ball.

I hope this was educational and not just providing evidence on how much my mathematical ability has deteriorated during the last lots of years since I left Uni as well as the ability lost in the last few minutes since I finished my birthday drink.

Thanks for the Birthday Wishes.