… Rooney has faded, of course, and fast; there is a reason José Mourinho spent much of last year slowly easing him out of his team. Time has taken its toll on Rooney more quickly, more cruelly than it has or will on others. His rapid descent was foreseen. He always had the look, the body, of a player who would burn brilliantly but briefly.
His greatness lay in his power, his dynamism, his explosiveness; over these last two, three, four years, all have visibly diminished. Rooney is not today, and will not be tomorrow, what he was yesterday.
There is something else at play, too, though, something perhaps unique to Rooney himself: a readiness, if not quite a glee, to write him off at the first available opportunity, to believe that there will be no final hurrah, no last swan song, no Indian summer. It is a trend that has its roots in what he was, who he is and where he came from.
For those of you who have dipped into my books and are frequent readers of my blog and tweets you’ll know that I’m fascinated by practice and training – specifically, what constitutes quality of practice and effective training.
I think Rio Ferdinand`s letter to his 12 year old self is an insightful example of the importance of the fundamentals of deliberate or deep practice (I happen to call it intentional practice which I talk about in Soccer Brain and Soccer tough II). Please be warned there is a great deal of swearing in Rio’s article.
Rio grew up in a tough urban area in London – a place called Peckham. And in the article he recalls how, as a 12 year old, he had to walk through a gypsy camp to reach a field where a select 20-30 young adults played football.
Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise journal from
Despite an intuitive relationship between technique and both running economy (RE) and performance, and the diverse techniques used by runners to achieve forward locomotion, the objective importance of overall technique and the key components therein remain to be elucidated. PURPOSE:
This study aimed to determine the relationship between individual and combined kinematic measures of technique with both RE and performance. METHODS:
Ninety-seven endurance runners (47 females) of diverse competitive standards performed a discontinuous protocol of incremental treadmill running (4-min stages, 1-km·h increments). Measurements included three-dimensional full-body kinematics, respiratory gases to determine energy cost, and velocity of lactate turn point. Five categories of kinematic measures (vertical oscillation, braking, posture, stride parameters, and lower limb angles) and locomotory energy cost (LEc) were averaged across 10-12 km·h (the highest common velocity < velocity of lactate turn point). Performance was measured as season's best (SB) time converted to a sex-specific z-score.
RESULTS:
Numerous kinematic variables were correlated with RE and performance (LEc, 19 variables; SB time, 11 variables). Regression analysis found three variables (pelvis vertical oscillation during ground contact normalized to height, minimum knee joint angle during ground contact, and minimum horizontal pelvis velocity) explained 39% of LEc variability. In addition, four variables (minimum horizontal pelvis velocity, shank touchdown angle, duty factor, and trunk forward lean) combined to explain 31% of the variability in performance (SB time). CONCLUSIONS:
This study provides novel and robust evidence that technique explains a substantial proportion of the variance in RE and performance. We recommend that runners and coaches are attentive to specific aspects of stride parameters and lower limb angles in part to optimize pelvis movement, and ultimately enhance performance.
What if you could “see” directly into another person’s brain? The ability to read minds, referred to as telepathy, is yet another concept that’s abundant in science fiction, but a former Facebook executive says that we could all be capable of at least seeing inside someone else’s mind — provided that we’re equipped with the right technology.
Mary Lou Jepsen was the head of display technology at Oculus before founding her own startup called Openwater. The company’s goal, while ambitious, is in theory quite simple: “to create a wearable to enable us to see the inner workings of the body and brain at high resolution.” In short, telepathy courtesy of a brain-computer interface (BCI) — a wearable device that works like a Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) machine.
“I don’t think this is going to take decades,” Jepsen said of the tech’s development, during an interview with CNBC. “I think we’re talking about less than a decade, probably eight years until telepathy.” Her company plans to make a very limited number of prototypes available to their early access partners by next year. – This Wearable Could Let Us Look Inside Another Person’s Brain – Jul.11.2017 https://www.nbcnews.com/mach/tech/wearable-could-let-us-look-inside-another-person-s-brain-ncna781781?cid=sm_npd_nn_fb_mc_170712 via NBC News
One of the more interesting goals in neuroscience is to reconstruct perceived images by analyzing brain scans. The idea is to work out what people are looking at by monitoring the activity in their visual cortex.
The difficulty, of course, is finding ways to efficiently process the data from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans. The task is to map the activity in three-dimensional voxels inside the brain to two-dimensional pixels in an image.
If you’re the type of person who needs at least one cup of coffee to get out of the house in the morning and a few more to make it through the day, you might think the best thing about java is that it keeps you awake.
But new research suggests that’s just a bonus. The best thing about your coffee habit might be that it extends your life by reducing your risk of death from heart disease, diabetes or even cancer.
Chicago’s sports statistics giant has grappled with some negative data since being acquired three years ago. During that time, Stats has lost deals as the official distributor of game statistics for the NFL, NBA, NHL and Nascar to a chief rival. It endured two rounds of layoffs in a seven-month span totaling roughly 80 employees, and several of the key architects of its most advanced and lucrative products left.
CEO Ken Fuchs thinks those developments reflect a 36-year-old company trying to pivot into a new market while maintaining its dominance in another. “A lot of our competition, I think they want to be what Stats was. We want to be what the next Stats will be,” says Fuchs, a former executive at Yahoo who took over in late 2015.
Long dominant in licensing and distributing game statistics and analysis to media outlets, Stats is now channeling its resources toward working with professional teams themselves.
Cast your mind back to the summer of 2007. Arsenal have just completed their first season at the Emirates. A legendary frenchman has left the club (no, not Jeremie Aliadiere to Middlesbrough, the other guy with 228 goals). Their pre-season schedule involved a friendly away to lowly Barnet, two games in Austria combined with a training camp, two games at home in the Emirates Cup before finishing with a similarly-styled Amsterdam tournament. All based on the continent and no lengthy trips across multiple time zones.
Last night Arsenal landed in Sydney, Australia. This is the first leg of their pre-season tour in which they will accumulate 21,933 miles in travel, more than any other Premier League side.
The European Football Championship for Women, in the Netherlands this summer, is the background for a large and innovative data research project. The Dutch football union is working together with Leiden University and Sportinnovator. The research is expected to uncover links that have thus far remained hidden. … To be able to perform optimally in top sport calls for optimal conditions. In the past, good shoes and a decent ball were enough, but today help comes from super computers. Scientists at Leiden University’s Sport Data Center know how to use the data to optimise the game. A large data study is expected to give new insights.
… “I think it’s a mixture of nurture and nature,” Quantrill said. “I’m not denying that having a dad who played in the big leagues is valuable. You tend to be a bigger guy. You’re probably going to be athletic. That being said, if you look around this locker room, there are a lot of guys bigger than me, a lot of guys stronger than me, who come from families that did not have a professional baseball player.
“And then there’s the nurture side. At 2 years old, I had a pitching coach. At 6 years old, I had a pitching coach. At 10 years old, I had a pitching coach. And it wasn’t a regular guy giving back to the community. I had a big leaguer as a pitching coach. We can debate if it’s 60-40 or 50-50, but a combination of those things is nothing but an advantage.”
Add in the socioeconomic element, and the advantage is palpable.
Recently, the Los Angeles Kings made a point to reference the fact that their team needs to generate better chances. This topic was revisited in a recent piece on pursuing Joe Thornton. In both pieces, the Kings are discussed as needing to generate higher quality chances to the slot area, whether that’s through passing or skating.
A little backstory: I diagnosed and wrote about this last year after viewing then Kings assistant coach Davis Payne’s presentation on generating offense during the coaching clinic at the NHL draft in Buffalo, NY. With the right data, it becomes possible to measure and evaluate how a team generates offense. Rather than look at the location of the shot, sequential passing data allows us to measure the impact on goal-scoring from different origin points on the ice, as well as the evaluating whether a pass or a shot was a better choice given the situation. Some of the findings from my work has led to the conclusion that teams don’t play behind net often enough.
Without going too deep into the numbers, the reason why playing behind the net is advantageous is because it predicts the rate at which your team will score goals much better than most other offensive metrics. So, if a team is dominating the shot totals, but struggles to score, it is worth the investment to review just how the team manufactures offense and seek to improve the quality of the team’s output.
When people discuss the problems with US youth soccer, they often point their fingers at the pay-to-play structure, which prices many players out of the game, or its lack of professional infrastructure. One thing, however, that few people discuss is embezzlement.
You don’t have to look far to find examples of the breadth of the problem. In recent years, teams as far afield as small-town Pennsylvania and California’s farm country have suffered financial losses in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
While those dollar figures might sound fantastically large, they are not uncommon. Over the past few decades, youth soccer clubs in the United States have evolved from small operations, where players and their parents paid for little more than uniforms and equipment, into enormous organizations with dozens of volunteers, hundreds of players, and budgets that in some cases surpass $1m.
Want to boost collaboration among researchers? Even in an age of easy virtual communication, physical proximity increases collaborative activity among academic scholars, according to a new study examining a decade’s worth of MIT-based papers and patents.
In particular, the study finds that cross-disciplinary and interdepartmental collaboration is fueled by basic face-to-face interaction within shared spaces.
“If you work near someone, you’re more likely to have substantive conversations more frequently,” says Matthew Claudel, a doctoral student in MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP) and the MIT Lab for Innovation Science and Policy, and the lead author of a new paper detailing the findings.