Are we expecting too much from Paul Pogba? Do we have to accept that he is just a talented footballer, but not as special or as important as we believed he would be.
When Paul Pogba returned back to Man United it appeared as though they had added a player who would be key to their resurgence after a few difficult years post-Ferguson. This was a player bought for a record £89m, a player regarded as one of the best talents in world football. This was seen as major acquisition from United, a show of intent and an important piece to Jose Mourinho’s new era at the club. As we come to the end of Pogba and Mourinho’s second season there appears to be significantly more issues and concerns than progression and positivity involving their record signing and experienced manager.
The path between European football and Major League Soccer has become a well-trodden one in recent years, with Steven Gerrard, David Beckham, David Villa, Thierry Henry, Andrea Pirlo, Frank Lampard and Kaka among those who have crossed the Atlantic in the latter stages of their career.
It isn’t just high-profile stars in their 30s who have made the move stateside, though. Philadelphia Union centre-back Jack Elliott was born in London but has only ever played professional football in the US, having been scouted while representing an amateur team in his hometown. It’s safe to say the switch from Sunday League to MLS, via the West Virginia University team, has been a surreal one for the 22-year-old.
“It was a crazy experience playing against them,” Elliott tells The Set Pieces, referring to opponents such as David Villa, Sebastian Giovinco and Jozy Altidore, all of whom the centre-back locked horns with in his debut campaign of 2017.
Injured players in the NBA face the dual challenge of working back to full health while often being separated from their teammates as they rehab. It’s a physical and mental grind that removes them from their usual routine and regular working relationships.
Since going down with injuries within three days of each other at the start of February, Milwaukee Bucks point guards Matthew Dellavedova and Malcolm Brogdon have faced the rehab process together, each spending extended time at the team’s Sports Science Center. While they have had the company of each other when the Bucks have gone on the road, it’s not the kind of companionship anyone hopes for — it means another member of the team is hurt.
As helpful as it may be to have someone going through the process alongside you, both players looked forward to at least rejoining their teammates on road trips, which would be a step toward normalcy.
Notice those innings logs from Matt Manning’s 2017 baseball season.
Inspect all 14 of his starts, from June 20 against the Tri-City Valley Cats, when he struck out six of his first seven batters, to Sept. 2, at West Michigan, when he pitched five innings against the Fort Wayne TinCaps, allowing a pair of hits while striking out nine and walking two.
What you see are flashes of a first-round draft pick’s sheer talent. What you also note is how little he has pitched. He threw only 51 innings last season and in only two of his starts did he pitch six innings.
The cameos had nothing to do with injuries. They had everything to do with the fact a man who last month turned 20 remains essentially a newcomer to competitive baseball.
Manning will work a good deal more in 2018, assuming his right arm, and 6-foot-6, 200-pound frame remain in the pink during a long season that for Manning probably will at least begin at West Michigan, the Tigers’ first-stage, full-season Single-A stop.
The Butler Bulldogs have a habit of shocking college basketball fans during the NCAA tournament, by beating top teams with far bigger stars. How do they do it? Adam Grant talks to Butler players, as well as to Boston Celtics coach Brad Stevens, “Moneyball” author Michael Lewis, and the “No-Stats All-Star” Shane Battier, to reveal how a culture of humility can propel a team – of any kind – to greater heights. [audio, 33:14]
Major League Baseball made game-calling more difficult for catchers this winter when it changed the rules governing mound visits. For backstops with the Tampa Bay Rays, things got even trickier when the club announced plans for a four-man rotation to open the season.
Pitching coach Kyle Snyder had an idea to help, and catchers Wilson Ramos and Jesus Sucre were eager to hop on board — quarterback-style wristbands loaded with information designed to help with pitch calling.
The Rays are joining the Indians, Mets and some others as teams arming their catchers with data-filled forearm sleeves. Tampa Bay hasn’t decided precisely what will be on the wristbands, though it will mostly include information on signs and strategies for attacking opposing hitters. The cards will have a flap to make sure opponents and cameras can’t catch what’s been written down.
arXiv, Physics > Physics and Society; A. Pluchino. A. E. Biondo, A. Rapisarda from
The largely dominant meritocratic paradigm of highly competitive Western cultures is rooted on the belief that success is due mainly, if not exclusively, to personal qualities such as talent, intelligence, skills, efforts or risk taking. Sometimes, we are willing to admit that a certain degree of luck could also play a role in achieving significant material success. But, as a matter of fact, it is rather common to underestimate the importance of external forces in individual successful stories. It is very well known that intelligence or talent exhibit a Gaussian distribution among the population, whereas the distribution of wealth – considered a proxy of success – follows typically a power law (Pareto law). Such a discrepancy between a Normal distribution of inputs, with a typical scale, and the scale invariant distribution of outputs, suggests that some hidden ingredient is at work behind the scenes. In this paper, with the help of a very simple agent-based model, we suggest that such an ingredient is just randomness. In particular, we show that, if it is true that some degree of talent is necessary to be successful in life, almost never the most talented people reach the highest peaks of success, being overtaken by mediocre but sensibly luckier individuals. As to our knowledge, this counterintuitive result – although implicitly suggested between the lines in a vast literature – is quantified here for the first time. It sheds new light on the effectiveness of assessing merit on the basis of the reached level of success and underlines the risks of distributing excessive honors or resources to people who, at the end of the day, could have been simply luckier than others. With the help of this model, several policy hypotheses are also addressed and compared to show the most efficient strategies for public funding of research in order to improve meritocracy, diversity and innovation.
Moisture-wicking clothes act to keep athletes cool and dry. Because exercising in the heat can have a severe impact on physical fatigue, companies promote their moisture-wicking products as the difference-maker in these conditions. However, there has yet to be an independent, peer-reviewed study that conclusively demonstrates that performance apparel improves our thermoregulation and performance. How does moisture-wicking work, how does it affect the wearer, and can it actually provide an edge?
How Does Moisture-Wicking Work?
Thermoregulation during exercise is important in order to balance the heat we produce with an appropriate amount of heat loss. The main way we get rid of the excess heat is by evaporation – by sweating. Clothing acts as a barrier to the evaporation of sweat off our skin and into the air. Moisture-wicking fabrics claim to provide better cooling and thermal balance and by reducing moisture accumulation on the skin, they should also increase the comfort of the wearer.
Brain imaging is an important tool for clinicians in diagnosing patients who have suffered from traumatic brain injury (TBI). Brain imaging techniques generally focus on either structure or function. With TBI, the focus is typically on the extent of structural brain damage, which is often assessed using computed tomography (CT). Structural brain scans provide information regarding the severity of TBI, which is largely determined by the extent of damage. But, what about measures of brain function?
Another brain imaging technique that has become a crucial instrument for scientists trying to learn more about how the brain works is functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). fMRI allows the examination of human brain function in a way that is not invasive and, in contrast to a CT scan, does not involve radiation. With the help of math and statistics, brain mappers are able to measure brain activity patterns. But, can fMRI also be used as a diagnostic tool for TBI? Because (a) no two brain injuries are identical and (b) the way in which brain injuries affect cognition and brain function is highly variable, the current picture of fMRI use as a diagnostic tool for TBI is unclear.
Nevertheless, new tools and techniques have recently been developed that allow for the assessment of brain function in TBI, as well as other types of brain injury. Using fMRI could thereby add a whole new dimension to our understanding of TBI and TBI recovery.
FOOTBALL’S fertile ground used to be zone 14, that golden square in front of the penalty area.
Now, for Manchester City and Pep Guardiola, it’s the ‘half space’, the channel between full back and centre half on either side of the area. In fact chunks of coaching courses are now devoted to it.
“Ninety percent cent of Manchester City’s goals come from this area,” Brighton midfielder Steve Sidwell said after attending a two-day session with the Football Association of Wales as part of his A Licence course a fortnight ago.
Coach’s challenges for goaltender interference and the ensuing arguments aren’t going away.
There will just be a new place to direct the complaints.
With the goal of refining the consistency of goalie interference challenges, NHL general managers on Wednesday recommended shifting the decision from on-ice officials to the league’s situation room in Toronto. The change could go into effect as soon as the playoffs, which begin April 11, after the NHL Players’ Association signed off and now just needs approval from the board of governors.
New York City FC’s academy is barely three years old, and has fielded a full slate of US Soccer Development Academy teams for a fraction of that time. The club is still building out its physical infrastructure and has only signed two Homegrown Players, the most recent being young right back Joe Scally, unveiled on Wednesday.
The rest of MLS should be nervous just the same.
HGPs are now announced with enough regularity these days for longtime MLS observers to lapse into “ho-hum” mode. In fact Scally isn’t even the first 15-year-old signed in MLS over the past year; he’s the fifth. But this latest one in particular may have NYCFC’s league counterparts shifting uneasily in their seats.
To appraise the career of Proskauer’s Howard Ganz is to traverse the last half century of American pro sports, when it mushroomed from a regional business into a nationwide corporate enterprise.
During that half-century ride, Ganz, co-head of Proskauer’s Sports Law Group, has been an integral part of some of the most significant changes in sports, including every NBA collective-bargaining agreement since 1967 and every MLB CBA since 1999.
As a hybrid labor lawyer and litigator, Ganz was outside counsel for MLB and the NBA during such seminal events as the ABA/NBA merger; the Knicks/Heat bench-clearing brawl during the 1997 playoffs; Pete Rose’s gambling transgressions and subsequent ban from baseball; the creation of the WNBA and its first CBA; performance-enhancing drug abuse, from Rafael Palmeiro to A-Rod; the Latrell Sprewell coach-choking incident; and John Rocker’s suspension after he said the 7 train to Shea Stadium was “like you’re riding through Beirut,” the first time an MLB player was suspended for something he said. When Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf refused to stand when the national anthem was played at NBA games, Ganz was knee deep in that — more than 20 years before NFL players were taking a knee during the national anthem.