Reise Allassani was the golden boy of the Crystal Palace academy, an England under-16 and under-17 international, the natural successor to Victor Moses and Wilfried Zaha, an explosive local winger with the world at his quick feet.
But it has taken a move further down the football pyramid than Allassani ever planned on going to learn what football is all about.
Allassani was released by Palace in 2016 and was on the brink of a move to Sheffield Wednesday in the Championship before suffering a devastating knee ligament injury. He was left without a club, unable to play or train for almost one whole year, a devastating blow to a talented player about to turn 21. He recalls now, 16 months on, how his “world came crashing down” when it happened.
… Gobert would be forced to trade in his Jazz jersey for tailored suits for another 15 games with a sprained PCL in his left knee and a bone bruise in his tibia after his teammate Derrick Favors accidentally rolled into his lower body.
For Gobert, it was the second time he had to push through a knee injury following his best season as a pro, where he made the All-NBA Second Team in 2017.
His patience was certainly tested throughout the second ordeal.
… In the case of the Raptors, they’ve made it imperative that you can’t spell development without the G League.
OG Anunoby is the only draft pick since 2012 to have not played a game for the affiliate team, and for good reason. Small forward has been a position of weakness for the Raptors for at least a decade, and his play through a bit over half the season has more than validated his starting spot over the likes of Norman Powell and C.J. Miles.
By normalizing assignments to the G League, what the Raptors have done better than anyone is remove the negative stigma of being “sent down.” Instead of riding the pine and trying to learn through osmosis, players are able to participate in game situations and improve on their individual games with usage rates that allow them to make mistakes and grow from them.
Elton Brand, a 17-year NBA veteran who starred for the Los Angeles Clippers, is now the general manager of Philadelphia’s affiliate club, the Delaware 87ers. He was effusive in his praise of the 905 and the way they’ve managed their youth.
“There are a few teams we look at and learn from and the 905 is certainly one of them,” Brand said. “When their young guys are not playing (for the Raptors), they’re in the G League working. When they come up, they’re contributing to the club. We see that and take note. You can also point to it and say, hey, this guy was drafted here, this guy was drafted there and still played X amount of G League minutes.”
Overconfidence is the mother of all psychological biases. I mean that in two ways. First, overconfidence is one of the largest and most ubiquitous of the many biases to which human judgment is vulnerable. For example, 93 percent of American drivers claim to be better than the median,[1] which is statistically impossible.[2] Another way in which people can indicate their confidence about something is by providing a 90 percent confidence interval around some estimate; when they do so, the truth often falls inside their confidence intervals less than 50 percent of the time,[3] suggesting they did not deserve to be 90 percent confident of their accuracy. In his 2011 book, Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman[4] called overconfidence “the most significant of the cognitive biases.” Among many other things, overconfidence has been blamed for the sinking of the Titanic, the nuclear accident at Chernobyl, the loss of Space Shuttles Challenger and Columbia, the subprime mortgage crisis of 2008 and the great recession that followed it, and the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.[5] Overconfidence may contribute to excessive rates of trading in the stock market, high rates of entrepreneurial failure, legal disputes, political partisanship, and even war.[6]
The second way overconfidence earns its title as the mother of all biases is by giving the other decision-making biases teeth. If we were appropriately humble about psychological vulnerabilities, we would be better able to protect ourselves from the errors to which human nature makes us prone.
… The successful transition from talented youngster to successful athlete is highly complex; luck no doubt plays a huge role, as do personality factors, but perhaps one under-considered area is the amount an athlete can improve. The times athletes run at age 15 don’t compare to their performance in their twenties, so it’s obvious that athletes have to improve. These improvements come about through maturation, but also training. Being able to favorably adapt to the training prescribed, and adapt to a greater extent than your sporting peers, is likely a huge differentiator between athletes who successfully go from talented youngster to successful adult, and those who don’t.
This is an area myself and John Kiely explored recently in a paper – Can the ability to adapt to exercise be considered a talent – and if so, can we test for it? – which was published recently in Sports Medicine Open.
Purpose: To examine association and prediction of load-based markers (rate of perceived exertion) with non-contact injuries.
Materials and methods: Thirty-four elite Italian football players (age 26 ± 5 y, height 182 ± 5 cm, body mass 78 ± 4 kg) participated in a 3-seasons prospective study. Markers examined were: RPE, exposure, weekly load, week-to-week load change, cumulative 2, 3, 4 WL, acute:chronic 1:2 (acute:chronic2), 1:3 (acute:chronic3) and 1:4 (acute:chronic4) WL ratios. After checking multicollinearity between markers, a Generalized Estimating Equation analysis was used to examine association with a non-contact injury in the subsequent week. The associated markers were split into four groups based on 15th, 50th, 85th percentile to compare injury risk (IR) in different zones. Prediction was examined with receiver operating characteristic curve, area under the curve (AUC) and Youden index.
Results: IR increased when acute:chronic2 of 1.00–1.20, >1.20 were compared to <0.81 (odds ratio (OR), 90% confidence interval (CI): 1.6, 0.79–3.29; 2.2, 1.03–4.74). IR increased when comparing acute:chronic3 of 1.01–1.23, >1.23 vs. <0.80 (OR, 90% CI: 1.9, 0.9–3.8; 2.5, 1.2–5.4). IR increased when comparing acute:chronic4 of 0.78–1.02, 1.02–1.26, >1.26 vs. <0.78 (OR, 90% CI: 2.4, 1.4–3.9; 3.3, 1.6–6.6; 3.5, 1.7–7.4). The AUC ≤0.60 for all markers and Youden Index (close to 0) showed poor prediction.
Conclusion: Acute:chronic markers showed association however with poor prediction ability.
“The Detectron project was started in July 2016 with the goal of creating a fast and flexible object detection system built on Caffe2, which was then in early alpha development. Over the last year and a half, the codebase has matured and supported a large number of our projects, including Mask R-CNN and Focal Loss for Dense Object Detection, which won the Marr Prize and Best Student Paper awards, respectively, at ICCV 2017.”
Touchscreens on mobile handheld devices can detect if and where a user is touching the screen, but standard technology cannot determine how much pressure is being exerted. Now, researchers at the University of California San Diego and the University of Texas at Austin have demonstrated a new technology for ‘force sensing’ that can be added to any type of display, including flexible devices, and potential other uses go far beyond touch screen displays on mobile devices.
Before he graduated from UC San Diego’s Jacobs School of Engineering, Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) alumnus Siarhei Vishniakou (Ph.D. ’16) worked with colleagues including his advisor, ECE professor Shadi Dayeh, to spin off a startup company, Dimensional Touch. He was also accepted into the NSF I-Corps I and II programs that help academics commercialize new technology.
… I have an RFID, or radio frequency ID, microchip implanted in my hand. Now with a wave, I can unlock doors, fire off texts, login to my computer, and even make credit card payments.
There are others like me: The majority of employees at the Wisconsin tech company Three Square Market (or 32M) have RFID implants, too. Last summer, with the help of Andy “Gonzo” Whitehead, a local body piercer with 17 years of experience, the company hosted a “chipping party” for employees who’d volunteered to test the technology in the workplace.
“We first presented the concept of being chipped to the employees, thinking we might get a few people interested,” CEO Todd Westby, who has implants in both hands, told me. “Literally out of the box, we had 40 people out of close to 90 that were here that said, within 10 minutes, ‘I would like to be chipped.’”
New graphene printing technology can produce electronic circuits that are low-cost, flexible, highly conductive and water repellent.
The nanotechnology “would lend enormous value to self-cleaning wearable/washable electronics that are resistant to stains, or ice and biofilm formation,” according to a recent paper describing the discovery.
“We’re taking low-cost, inkjet-printed graphene and tuning it with a laser to make functional materials,” said Jonathan Claussen, an Iowa State University assistant professor of mechanical engineering, an associate of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Ames Laboratory and the corresponding author of the paper recently featured on the cover of the journal Nanoscale.
… Leigh Turner, an associate professor at the University of Minnesota’s Center for Bioethics, estimates that at least half of the nation’s existing stem-cell clinics could be offering untested therapies. “Some of these clinics are making outrageous marketing claims,” he says, noting that there are plenty of case studies to support the enthusiasm in the burgeoning stem-cell field but not enough hard data from clinical trials. Physicians promising to, say, cure macular degeneration or repair a torn tendon or relieve arthritis are taking an ethical leap. “It’s like the Wild West right now,” says Shane Shapiro, a program director at the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville.
That’s not to say that all stem-cell therapies are suspect. Over the past decade, countless clinical trials have shown that stem-cell injections can reduce scarring and regrow muscle tissue in heart-attack patients. Stem-cell products designed to treat cardiac failure have already been approved in South Korea, and advanced trials are under way in the U.S. and Europe.
Amsterdam Collaboration on Health & Safety in Sports from
Have you ever wondered why some patients do not adhere to drug prescrip- tions despite warnings regarding the health consequences of non-adherence? The simple reason is that it takes more than just a prescription and education to get patients to take their drugs. A similar scenario has become apparent in the field of sport injury prevention.
In a collaboration with the University of Calgary and the university of Bath, we had the opportunity to contribute to an editorial by Oluwatoyosi Owoeye, highlighting the importance of adherence in sport injury prevention research and practice. This text provides a framework to raise the bar for sport injury prevention adherence research.
… The Tennis Australia Game Insight Group (GIG), in partnership with Victoria University, has analysed data from Federer and Nadal’s performances at the Australian Open over the past six years to provide some insights into what separates these two masters from the rest.
Both players are elite “clutch” performers – that is, they win more of the big points than the rest. Traditionally the only way to infer a player’s clutch ability was to crudely count the number of break points won.
But the GIG now mathematically determine the relative importance of every point in a match to produce a clutch index.
… Opposing teams worked out how to play against Leicester and Puel’s predecessors failed to adapt. Shakespeare was understandably keen to return to the tactics that had won them the title, but key players had departed and opponents were wise to their approach. The quality of the football stagnated and the star performers who still in the squad were unable to sparkle.
Leicester were in need of a facelift and Puel has duly obliged. They remain a threat on the counterattack but the manager has urged his players to show more patience. Too often they were in a rush to get the ball forward, which put a huge amount of responsibility on Jamie Vardy – who was not given the same quality of service after Kanté and Danny Drinkwater moved to Chelsea.
Leicester’s average for possession dropped to a new low of 41.1% before Puel’s arrival. They have never dominated possession – they saw just 42.6% of the ball in the season they won the league – but that figure has been decreasing steadily over the last few years. Puel has altered their approach, with their share of possession rising drastically to 47.5%. They averaged around 250 passes per game under both Ranieri and Shakespeare, but they now attempt over 300, at an improved (if still modest) 75% accuracy.
The Wall Street Journal’s Sam Walker recently wrote a fascinating new sports book called “the Captain Class” detailing the surprising edge that makes for dynasties in team sports. Not to give anything away but the gist of the book is that building a dynasty in team sports requires that the team be captained by a selfless, grinding leader. One of the early teams he profiles is the 1950’s Hungary national football team, which was a forerunner to the “total football” approach that has dominated European soccer styles since and was a key component to the 1970’s Dutch teams or the “tiki taka” Barcelona teams that dominated the 2000s and allowed Spain to dominate the turn of the decade.
The idea is simple, instead of relying on specialists at the various positions the goal is to field as many versatile, complete players as possible. This has multiple advantages, the main one of which is allowing the team to cycle through the OODA loop more quickly than their opponents and always be ready to capitalize on opportunities because everything doesn’t have to be “just so” in terms of alignments. If you’re a midfielder in position to make the play a forward makes, you make it, and you’ve been training to make it not just to excel at all of the aspects of midfield play.
