Roger Federer withdrew from the Australian Open while he continues preparing to return to action after two operations on his right knee and a tour absence that will have lasted longer than a year, his agent told The Associated Press.
Tony Godsick — Federer’s long-time representative and CEO of their management company, TEAM8 — said Sunday he is working on putting together a 2021 tennis calendar for the 20-time Grand Slam champion, who plans to get back to competition soon after the year’s first major tennis tournament.
… sports fans are not satisfied with simply labelling each of the Big 3 as “one of the best.” But unlike other ongoing GOAT disputes (such as Michael Jordan versus LeBron James in basketball), the Big 3 are easier to compare with one another because they are contemporaries. While the debate is not yet settled and time will still tell, a current holistic analysis of the Big 3 reveals that Novak Djokovic is the greatest tennis player of all time.
… Lijnders is speaking at the Melwood training ground. Dressed in a club jumper featuring six stars symbolising the European Cup victories he explains how the technical staff work on a daily basis. “Jürgen [Klopp] is the leader and face of the team, the one who defines the character and who stimulates everyone. Pete [Peter Krawietz] is responsible for the analysis and prepares everything in regards to videos which are shown to the players. I’m responsible for the training process.
“Together we decide what kind of aspects we want to develop for the team and then I create the exercises. It’s quite simple; it’s just about the continuing stimulation of our mentality to conquer the ball as quick and as high up the pitch as possible. That element comes back in every exercise. We as staff always try to find ways so the players can be more spontaneous and more creative.”
McGill University, Office for Science and Society from
I want the Dunning-Kruger effect to be real. First described in a seminal 1999 paper by David Dunning and Justin Kruger, this effect has been the darling of journalists who want to explain why dumb people don’t know they’re dumb. There’s even video of a fantastic pastiche of Turandot’s famous aria, Nessun dorma, explaining the Dunning-Kruger effect. “They don’t know,” the opera singer belts out at the climax, “that they don’t know.”
I was planning on writing a very short article about the Dunning-Kruger effect and it felt like shooting fish in a barrel. Here’s the effect, how it was discovered, what it means. End of story.
But as I double-checked the academic literature, doubt started to creep in. While trying to understand the criticism that had been leveled at the original study, I fell down a rabbit hole, spoke to a few statistics-minded people, corresponded with Dr. Dunning himself, and tried to understand if our brain really was biased to overstate our competence in activities at which we suck… or if the celebrated effect was just a mirage brought about by the peculiar way in which we can play with numbers.
Have we been overstating our confidence in the Dunning-Kruger effect?
Leicester City will train at their new £95m training ground in Seagrave for the the first time on Christmas Eve.
The 180-acre site has been under construction since Spring 2019 and will be home to the men’s first team and Academy. The club have described it as the best training facility in Europe.
… “He had got himself grounded, and so he hadn’t been allowed to go anywhere except for to school,” she said. “We kind of don’t know anywhere else he could have gotten it besides school.”
He recovered in a few days and was back to playing basketball after a two-week quarantine.
But as Thanksgiving approached, Cooper called to come home from practice, unusual for a kid with bottomless energy. His fever spiked above 103 degrees, and the medicine his parents gave him didn’t help. He was throwing up; he tossed and turned at night.
As the days wore on and Cooper’s fever refused to break, his parents rushed him to a local hospital, where doctors ran tests to try to figure out what was wrong. Not seeing improvement and suspecting appendicitis, they loaded him into an ambulance for a three-hour white-knuckle drive through the mountains to Primary Children’s Hospital in Salt Lake City.
… There are potential legal issues with Johnson’s situation.
The first is whether Johnson received adequate care. To be sure, if Johnson fully recovers, he would likely focus on resuming his basketball career. He was the SEC’s Preseason Player of the Year and is regarded as a first round prospect in the 2021 NBA draft.
Yet if health ailments prevent Johnson from continuing his career or diminish his skills, he could explore whether other parties might be legally responsible and should pay him monetary damages to account for lost earning power. To that point, it should be noted, Johnson’s family has already suggested his situation is one they hope other families can avoid. “We are committed,” the family expressed in a statement, “to sharing not only updates on Keyontae but also any information we think could help others.”
The reasonableness of school and conference return-to-play policies, for example, could spark a negligence lawsuit against Florida, the SEC and third parties that cleared him to play.
Duke women’s basketball has ended its season, the Associated Press reported Friday, nine days after pausing activities due to two new COVID-19 cases within the program.
Following a home loss to Louisville on Dec. 9, Duke head coach Kara Lawson was asked about her “comfort level” regarding continuing the season as COVID-19 cases rose in North Carolina.
“I don’t think we should be playing right now. That’s my opinion on it,” Lawson said.
As we close out the most challenging year in recent memory, there is much uncertainty. Whenever our society returns to “normal” — whatever that means — there will be profound changes to how we live. Sports are not immune to this.
As part of the Aspen Institute Sports & Society Program’s Future of Sports conversation series, which will restart in early 2021, we asked smart, thoughtful people who work in sports this question: What innovations and/or disruptions to sports during Covid-19 do you think will become permanent after the pandemic? Here are some of the responses, edited for brevity.
In the second of his regular columns, renowned physiotherapist and best-selling author Paul Hobrough examines Achilles tendinopathy – a problem which can afflict many a runner
Anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) ruptures are common in soccer players, and reconstructive surgery is often performed to restore knee stability and enable a return to play. Purpose:
To investigate whether an ACL reconstruction for talented youth soccer players affects their potential to become elite players at the senior level. Study Design:
Cohort study; Level of evidence, 3. Methods:
All soccer players who participated in the Swedish National Elite Camp for 15-year-old players between 2005 and 2011 (N = 5285 players; 2631 boys and 2654 girls) were matched with the Swedish National Knee Ligament Registry to identify the players who had undergone ACL reconstruction. Information on player participation in Swedish league games and level of play was collected from the Swedish Football Association’s administrative data system. The players with an ACL reconstruction who were injured at the ages of 15 to 19 years were compared with the rest of the players who participated in the National Elite Camp to see whether an early ACL reconstruction affected whether they remained active as soccer players and their chance to play at the elite level as seniors. Results:
A total of 524 (9.9%) players had undergone an ACL reconstruction, and 292 (5.5%; 75 male and 217 female) had sustained their injury at age 15 to 19 years. During the follow-up period, 122 (23.3%) players underwent ACL reconstruction: revision (11.5%; n = 60) or contralateral (11.8%; n = 62). Male and female soccer players undergoing an ACL reconstruction at age 15 to 19 years experienced no significant effect on being active or playing at the elite level in the season that they turned 21 years old. Of the youth players who underwent ACL reconstruction, 12% of the male players and 11.5% of the female players progressed to the elite level at the age of 21 years compared with 10.3% of the men and 11.1% of the women among the uninjured players. Conclusion:
ACL reconstructive surgery in talented youth soccer players offers them the opportunity to become elite players as seniors and permits an activity level on a par with that of their uninjured peers. However, almost 1 in 4 requires further ACL surgery, so the players’ future knee health should be considered when deciding on a return to play.
… “Every school has different protocols or different ways or different ways that they adjust everything,” she said.
For [Jimmy] Martelli and [Erica] Snow, a goal during this time — amplified compared to a typical year — is helping their respective coaching staffs be able to focus their attention on basketball.
And not as much on the periphery activity, which this year is so pervasive.
Martelli described it as deciphering what he’s being told — what’s going to be finalized and what’s not and, subsequently, what may be worth sharing.
“I’m trying to make their lives easier, so that they don’t even have to think about anything other than basketball,” Snow said.
… The managers of the other European football leagues have always been interested in Boxing Day, asking themselves if they could move their players’ winter break to other dates, and achieve a similar success to the UK Boxing Day. The most serious attempt to imitate it was made by Italy’s Serie A in 2018. Their management explained that they were inspired by the English model, and by a previous test carried out the year before with the second-tier teams, which had been successful. However, contrary to what was hoped, the meetings did not arouse the interest or the attendance that was expected from on public holidays. The stadiums received less affluence than in a regular league match, the television audience was poor, and the players’ performance was improvable. Three months later, Serie A announced that it was resuming the traditional two-week Christmas holiday break.
The report to the Italian Football Federation left no doubt about why Boxing Day football did not get the positive results expected, highlighting the cultural differences compared to the UK. While English fans have a long Christmas football tradition, Italians are used to meeting friends and family for Christmas, they are not used to having football as part of their fun. Trips to family homes, which are very common, also make fans be away from the stadiums they tend to go. As any marketing specialist would explain, there is nothing harder, nor more expensive, than varying a human behaviour. And making non-English Europeans include football into their Christmas priorities certainly is one. The Premier League also has something the Serie A did not, which is full control over television rights for its domestic market, and an audience that has been historically high in Boxing Day. On the contrary, European measurement agencies have noted that Christmas time is a period in which the audience drops in all stations and channels, without exception.
In the Italian report there was also another issue that English team coaches have often complained about. Preventing players from having a Christmas break has a negative impact on their performance. Italians played poorly on the field. Louis Van Gaal, in his period as the Manchester United coach, was very critical of the number of Christmas competitions during Boxing Day. It was impossible for the English team to win because the players were exhausted by the end of the season.
Data can change over time. This can result in poor and degrading predictive performance in predictive models that assume a static relationship between input and output variables.
This problem of the changing underlying relationships in the data is called concept drift in the field of machine learning.
In this post, you will discover the problem of concept drift and ways to you may be able to address it in your own predictive modeling problems.
… The reality is that a club’s success with their young players isn’t down purely to the employment of a loan manager – although they undeniably help – but to a philosophy that is geared towards giving those same players the best opportunity possible to prove they are good enough. Essentially, the whole club must look to providing paths that lead to the first team rather than obstacles that make it impossible to do so.
Unsurprisingly, a manager who adopts such a holistic view is Sean Dyche. He has been in charge at Burnley for the past eight years and has built the club to being a Premier League regular. Atypically in a league where there is so much money, this has been achieved through good coaching and astute purchases rather than the availability of huge funds.