Tag: definitions

What do the 20 most common strange soccer terms mean?

Soccer has always has an air of “otherness” in the United States. It’s the major world sport we are the worst at. Somehow in the 1960s or 70s, it became culturally associated with the liberal political leanings that often went along with an inclination towards international and particularly European ideas and culture. Unlike ice hockey, which is still primarily a Canadian and European sport, the best soccer leagues in the world do not reside in the United States. For all these reasons, soccer terminology remains opaque to many casual fans or non-fans of the sport. To help with this problem, here are definitions for the 20 most common strange soccer terms.

  1. Cap – Not part of a team’s uniform (or kit — bonus word!), a cap is an appearance on a country’s national team. The number of caps a player has is used as a sign of how experienced she is.
  2. Nil – Fancy sounding word for zero. Used by British and Anglophilic soccer fans.
  3. Pitch – The field of play. As in, the place you would pitch the ball from if you were playing baseball or cricket.
  4. False nine – Soccer has a traditional system or systems of numbers that refer to positions. Nine is the striker or forward. A team is said to be using a false nine when their farthest forward player frequently drops back farther than a normal striker would.
  5. Stoppage/injury/added time – Soccer is the only timed sport whose official clock is kept secret during the game. Only the ref knows how much time is really left. Stoppage time, injury time, and added time are all phrases used to refer to the period between when 45 minutes have elapsed from the start of a half to when the referee blows her whistle to end the game. The ref announces an estimate of how many minutes this will be at the end of each half but he is not held to it.
  6. 4-4-2 – A common soccer formation. In numerically expressed formations like this, the numbers refer to the players in each level of play, starting on defense, right after the goalie. 4-4-2 is four defenders, four midfielders, and two forwards.
  7. Clean sheet – Close to synonymous with a shutout in American sports. Credit for a clean sheet is usually given to a team’s goalie and defenders. Some may even have contractual bonuses for clean sheets.
  8. Switch the field – To pass the ball a long way across the field. An attacking team may switch the ball from the left side to the right if they aren’t having success creating offensive chances on the original side.
  9. Golazo – An unusually beautiful goal. The creativity and technical excellence of the goal matter more for qualification as a golazo than the importance of the goal.
  10. Nutmeg – When one player tricks another player by passing, shooting, or dribbling the ball between their opponent’s legs. The term’s derivation is disputed but one great theory involves spice counterfeiting.
  11. Parking the bus – When one team commits all their resources to defending. This can be a good strategy against a superior team. The U.S. Women’s National Team expects that a lot of their opponents will play this way against them.
  12. Advantage – If a team has a foul committed on them but would be disadvantaged by stopping the game, a referee can choose to play or call advantage and let the play continue. If the foul warrants a yellow or red card, the ref can give the offending player her card the next time the game stops.
  13. Professional foul – An intentional foul committed by a player (usually a defender) to prevent a scoring chance. The best professional fouls are ones that anticipate the action by enough to avoid being penalized specifically for taking a scoring chance away from the other team.
  14. Through ball – A pass that is designed to go behind the opposing team’s defensive line where it can be picked up by a teammate of the player passing the ball.
  15. Tiki-taka – A style of play, popularized by the Spanish men’s national team, that relies on high volume, relatively safe short passes to move the ball and maintain possession. World soccer seems to be at the tail end of a time when this style was ascendant.
  16. Woodwork – The goals may no longer be made out of wood, but the goal posts (sides) and cross bar (top) are still referred to by their original material. A shot that hits the goal may be said to leave the “woodwork” ringing.
  17. Work rate – An imaginary stat that refers to how hard a player is playing. Technology has recently made it possible to quantify part of this by tracking how far each player runs during a game. Central or defensive midfielders usually have the highest work rates and sure enough, they usually run the farthest.
  18. Overlap – A common track a player might run in relative to her teammate who has the ball. Overlapping or running an overlap is to run between the player with the ball and the sideline, from behind the player to ahead of her. This serves to give the player with the ball a passing option and also to stretch the defensive players farther away from each other by forcing one of them to follow the player making the overlap run.
  19. Booking – When a referee disciplines a player by giving him a yellow or red card. Two yellows in one game or a single (called a straight) red means immediate expulsion from the game. After being expelled, the player’s team has to play the rest of the game down a player, they cannot add a substitute.
  20. Cynical – A play that violates unwritten rules. On offense, this usually applies to flagrant simulation or diving. On defense, this is normally a professional foul. A foul need not be violent to qualify as cynical.

What is a defender or fullback in soccer?

Are you big? A little slow? Do you have the desire to play soccer but not the dribbling skills? Able to kick the ball hard but not aim it that well? There’s a good chance that you play defense on your soccer team. Of course, world class defenders or fullbacks are neither slow nor bad at dribbling or shooting. Instead of playing defense because of their deficit in the skills department, the defenders you see playing soccer on television play defense because of what they have more of than anyone else: size, strength, and determination. Defenders use their size to out-jump opposing forwards when a ball is played in the air. They use their strength to muscle the opposition off the ball when they have possession of it. Like offensive linemen in football, defenders have the least margin for error and the most dramatic consequences for failing. (Some would argue the goalie has less but its understood that the goalie’s task is virtually impossible, whereas defenders are always supposed to succeed.) As such, the players who are attracted to playing defense and who succeed there are strong-willed and determined. No matter what it takes, their job is to stop the opposition from scoring and they’ll find a way to do it. Defenders may not run as much as midfielders during a normal game or sprint as quickly or as often as strikers, but they have to do it for a full 90 minutes. It’s very rare, except in cases of injury, for a team to spend one of its three substitutions on a defender. Some defenders find a way to get into the act on offense as well. Normally, this chance comes on set pieces, particularly corner kicks, when the ball is going to be in the air and a defender’s size is an advantage.

Central Defenders

The most common formation involves four defenders. Of these, two are considered central defenders, two outside defenders. Of the big, strong, determined defenders, central defenders are bigger, and stronger, and more determined than the rest. As central defenders, their responsibility lies in the area right in front of their goal — the most dangerous area for an opponent to have the ball. A great central defender will keep the ball from ever getting to that area by positioning herself to intercept any passes into that area. If a player tries to dribble the ball into that area, they should expect to be met by a firm and well placed pair of cleats. In modern soccer, the four defenders are usually deployed in a horizontal line across the field, so the two central defenders have overlapping but similar responsibilities. In older formations, they were often stacked vertically, one as a first line of defense, called the stopper, and one as a last resort, called a sweeper. Among the sweeper’s responsibility was to coordinate the other defenders and any other teammates necessary. Nowadays, that responsibility will be given to one or the other central defender. It’s not uncommon for that player also to be the captain of the team.

One strange vestigial aspect of soccer tactics is the habit of British soccer people to call a central defender, a “center half” or a “center half-back.” This is confusing because Americans use the term “half-back” synonymously with midfielder, so it not only doesn’t make sense to call a central defender a “center half” but it actively subverts something you think you know about positions. The reason for this is that in the very, very old days of British soccer, teams often played with only two defenders. As it became more necessary to have four full-time defenders, the two existing defenders shifted farther out, to the sides of the field and two central midfielders, called center half-backs, slid back to play defense. Though their role changed, these players held on to their positional name.

Outside Defenders

Outside defenders are a more varied bunch than central defenders. Whereas central defenders almost need to be tall, because the primary responsibility of an outside or wing defender is to prevent a player from crossing the ball into the penalty box, outside defenders can be a little shorter. While their central counterparts almost always stay back, even when their team has the ball, an outside defender may transition quickly to offense, sprinting up the side of the field. An outside defender’s closest teammate is often the midfielder in front of her, with whom she can play intricate give-and-goes to move the ball up the field. Since attacking is more prestigious than defending, even in a sport as low-scoring as soccer, the best known outside defenders in the world are offensive players. In the past twenty five years, Brazilian wing-backs have made a name for themselves internationally and on club teams throughout the world as talented offensive outside defenders. Based on the opponent and the composition their own team, a coach may choose to play with two offensive-minded outside defenders, two defensive-minded outside defenders, or even mix and match. Of course, none of these forays up the field excuse a defender from his defensive responsibilities. Even when caught way out of position, an outside defender has to have the speed and stamina to get back on defense before they are missed.

What is the sport of athletics?

Dear Sports Fan,

My family and I just got back from a trip to Europe. We spent several days in Iceland where we were regaled with stories of Icelandic sports, including their country’s four Olympic medals. Two of the medals are in a sport called “athletics.” What is the sport of athletics?

Thanks,
Mia

Dear Mia,

Athletics is an umbrella term that refers to a number of sports, many of the Olympic ones. It’s primarily a British term. The American equivalent is “Track and Field.” In the current Summer Olympics, the sports that fall under the general term Athletics include: running (everything from a 100 meter sprint to a marathon), hurdles, the steeplechase, relay races, race walking, the four jumping sports (high jump, long jump, pole vault, and triple jump), the four throwing sports (javelin, shot put, discus, and hammer throw), and the decathlon.

As for Iceland’s two medal winners, here is their story. Vilhjálmur Einarsson won the silver medal in the triple jump during the 1956 Summer Olympics in Melbourne. Vala Flosadóttir won the bronze medal in the pole vault during the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney. Oddly, it seems that Icelandic athletes do well in Australia.

I mentioned before that “athletics” and “track and field” were basically the same term but that there are slight differences. Track and field, the predominant American field, refers only to sports that take place in a big stadium that includes both a track and a field. Athletics also encompasses sports that are like the sports that would take place in that arena but that need a little more space or different terrain. The three main sports that are included in athletics but not track and field are the marathon and race walking, which usually take place on roads, and cross-country running which takes place on grass and mud. In general use though, particularly pertaining to the Olympics, they’re the same thing. One is just a Britishism and one an American term.

Thanks for your question,
Ezra Fischer

What does it mean to be a two possession game?

Dear Sports Fan,

I was watching a playoff basketball game last night and I heard the announcers talking about the game becoming a “two possession” game if someone made a free throw. It was clearly important but I’m not sure what it means. Is it about how much time is left? Or the score? What does it mean to be a two possession game? And why is it important?

Thanks,
Maria

Dear Maria,

A two possession game is a game in which one team is winning by enough points that the team that is trailing cannot catch up with a single score. The term is usually used in basketball and football, two games where scoring can be done in different increments. The number of possessions needed to tie the game is a simple mathematical equation based on how scoring works in each sport.

In football, the highest number of points that a team can score at a time is eight which they could achieve by scoring a touchdown followed by a two point conversion. A football game is said to be a “one possession” game if the team leading is leading by eight or fewer points. In basketball, the most points a team can score in one trip down the court is actually four points (a player is fouled while shooting a three point shot but still makes the basket; they are given the three points and get one chance at the free throw line to add a single point to their total) but this is so rare and so easy to prevent (just don’t foul a player taking a three point shot) that it’s generally discarded from the conversation. Instead, in basketball, a single possession game is generally thought of as one in which the team trailing is losing by three points or fewer. If you want more information (and a handy chart) on how scoring works across different sports, check out our post on the topic here. A two possession game in basketball is one in which a team is trailing by three to six points. Down by seven points? That’s a three possession game. 10, 11, or 12 would be a four possession game. Football follows the same pattern by eights. A zero to eight point deficit is a one possession game, nine to 16 is a two possession game, 17-24 is a three possession game, and so on.

The importance of whether a game is a one, two, or three possession game is tactical. While you were wrong in thinking that the term was based on the amount of time left, you were on to something. People usually talk about how many possessions apart the teams are only close to the end of the game, and end of game tactics are very much about the combination of score and time. A trailing team’s players, coaches, and fans are constantly doing a mental calculation: “how far behind are we and how much time do we have left to catch up?” One very useful short-hand to that mental math is to express both sides of the equation in terms of possessions — “how many possessions do we need to tie the game and how many possessions might there be time for?”

The end of basketball games is often defined by one team intentionally fouling the other. This topic is worth a blog post of its own, but the short story for why they do this is that a foul stops the clock. While fouling will give the other team an easy opportunity to get up to two points by successfully shooting free throws, it also extends the game by creating time for more possessions with the ball, during which the trailing team could score two or three points. What you probably saw was a player from the team that had the lead shooting a free throw that was intentionally given up by the trailing team. If that player had missed, the trailing team could have taken the ball and tied the game on that possession, whit a single shot. If the player made the free throw, it would have pushed the difference between the teams from three to four points, and meant that the trailing team would have needed to get the ball, score, and then either stop the other team from scoring or intentionally foul again, before having a chance to tie the game. The difference between a one possession game and a two possession game is a big deal.

Thanks for reading,
Ezra Fischer

 

Who had the term "field goal" first, basketball or football?

Dear Sports Fan,

I was surprised to learn that there are field goals in basketball as well as football. What’s up with that? Who had the term “field goal” first, basketball or football?

Thanks,
Ivan

Dear Ivan,

The term field goal refers to one way of scoring in both football and basketball. As we covered in our How does scoring work across sports post, in football, a field goal is when a team kicks the ball between the uprights not directly after a touchdown. In basketball, it’s a more general term that covers the majority of shot attempts. The only way to score in basketball that doesn’t count as a field goal is the free throw, an undefended shot awarded to a team that has been fouled in particular circumstances. As for which sport had the term first, there doesn’t seem to be a clear answer to that question but the smart money is on football as having had it first.

Basketball has a very distinct creation story. The sport was invented by James Naismith, a gym teacher at a YMCA in Springfield, Massachusetts in 1891. His 13 rules of basketball are become a treasured document in the sports history. Nowhere in those rules does the term field goal show up, but he uses the word field to refer to the area of play and goals to refer to made baskets. The leap to using the term field goal to refer to a subset of the goals is not a big one, particularly because he did carve out goals that would be awarded in a different way. In the original rules of basketball, a team that was on the receiving end of three straight fouls from the other team would be awarded on goal.

Football is an older sport and came about in a more evolutionary way than basketball. I don’t know exactly when there were first more than one way to score in football but by 1883, safely eight years before basketball was invented, one of the pioneer rule makers, Walter Camp, was already tinkering with how much different types of scoring should be worth, including the field goal. He settled on “four points for a touchdown, two points for kicks after touchdowns, two points for safeties, and five for field goals.”

The only article I could find explicitly addressing your question was this one by Mark Lieberman on the University of Pennsylvania’s Language Log blog. The article is well worth reading, as is the discussion in the comments section.

In terms of why the distinction matters in basketball, one main reason that it helps generate the commonly used statistic of field goal percentage. Field goal percentage is roughly the number of shots made divided by the number of shots attempted. This stat is a traditional one used to express how efficiently a player scores. Free throws (which are not counted as field goals) are excluded from this calculation. On one hand, this makes the statistic more useful because it isolates one skill (shooting within the flow of the game) from another (converting free throws.) On the other hand, points from free throws are worth just as much as points from other shots, and a possession that ends with a player being fouled is usually thought of as an offensive success, but in terms of field goal percentage would not show up at all. This type of gap between statistic and reality is why we have had so many new statistics invented in the past ten years.

Thanks for reading,
Ezra Fischer

What is traveling in basketball?

Dear Sports Fan,

What is traveling in basketball? Can you explain the traveling rule? I know it has something to do with a player walking instead of dribbling but I don’t quite understand how it works.

Thanks,
Traci

Dear Traci,

Like you said, traveling is a rule in basketball that dictates how a player can move with the ball. A traveling violation is called when a player moves in an improper way. When this happens, a ref blows his or her whistle and the ball is given to the team that had been defending. Beyond this, I have to admit that I’m probably about as unclear as you are. Traveling has officially flummoxed me! It’s a strange feeling. Usually, when I get a question, I have a pretty good idea of how to answer it. Other times, I have to dig into the internet and do some research before I can come up with an answer. Even with the hardest questions, it’s rare for me to be stumped, even after reading up on a subject. Traveling is just one of those semi-unfathomable mysteries in life, like the nature of black holes or why breakfast is so satisfying when eaten at non-traditional times. Still, your question deserves an answer, so I’ll do my best.

From an overly simplified vantage point, traveling is easy to understand. Imagine teaching a child to play basketball. The first thing you establish would probably be the goal of the game — to get the ball through the basket in a top-down direction. Great! The kid gets it, grabs the ball, runs down the court and tries to score. “No, no” you might say, “you can’t just run with the ball, it’s not like football.” Then you’d explain the second most obvious rule in basketball — that you have to bounce the ball on the floor while moving with it. Traveling is the name given to a violation of this second rule. In principle, it’s simple. In reality, it’s complicated. I think the best way to delve into the complications is in the form of a question and answer session.

Q: Does it matter how many steps you take between bounces while you’re dribbling?
A: No! As long as you are dribbling, you can pretty much do whatever you want — you can take giant tall dribbles with lots of steps between bounces or tiny small ones.

Q: Can you start dribbling, stop, and then start again?
A: No! Once a player starts dribbling with the ball, she has to keep dribbling to keep moving. If she stops, another player on either team (or the rim) has to touch the ball before she can start dribbling again.

Q: Do you have to start dribbling right away, once you get the ball?
A: No! If a player gets the ball and comes to a stop (or maybe he was already standing still) without dribbling, he can stand still with the ball without dribbling. He can even move around a little as long as one foot remains still on the ground. This foot is called the “pivot foot.”

Q: What’s the deal with squirming around on the ground? I’ve seen that sometimes called traveling.
A: You’re right! If a player is on the ground, she may not “gain an advantage” by sliding while holding onto the ball.

Q: Okay, got it. This doesn’t seem so complicated. So, how many steps can a player take without dribbling?
A: Ah. There’s the rub. I don’t really know. The traditional, basketball-folk story has been that only two steps were allowed. In recent years though, particularly in the NBA (all our discussion today has been about NBA rules, although NCAA rules are not so different) this has obviously not been the case. Some of this is due to a culture of leniency when it comes to how referees enforce the traveling rules. Perhaps the league instructed them to err on the side of allowing play to continue undisturbed unless the traveling violation were particularly offensive. That’s possible. But it’s also true that the rule seems to almost intentionally obfuscate the issue. Instead of simply talking about steps, the rule uses the word “counts.” For example, “A player who receives the ball while he is progressing or upon completion of a dribble, may use a two-count rhythm in coming to a stop, passing or shooting the ball.” It then goes on, in great and almost incomprehensible detail to try to define what counts as a “count.” Some of the sub-definitions refer to the number of steps a player can take, some don’t. It’s almost as if the NBA wanted to make the traveling rule so complicated that fans (and maybe even players) would simply have to take the referees word as the truth.

Q: Hmm. So when you watch a basketball game, you really have no idea when traveling is going to be called?
A: No — that’s the funny thing. I generally do know when traveling is and isn’t going to be called. It’s as if, over the hundreds of hours I’ve spent watching basketball, I’ve developed an instinct for traveling as defined by NBA refs collective judgement. I know it when I see it (most of the time) but I can’t properly explain it. This is frustrating to me because it goes against my theory that with proper explanation, non-sports fans would be able to understand and enjoy sports much more than they do today.

Q: So what do I do now? How can I learn more about traveling?
A: Well, I guess the best thing to do is to understand the basic principles, which I hope this blog post has helped with, and then understand that even the most die-hard basketball fans probably don’t actually understand much more than that. Sometimes just knowing that other people don’t know either is all you need to know. You know? Armed with that understanding, you should feel free to watch lots of basketball and build your own sense of what should and shouldn’t be a travel. There are also lots of YouTube compilations of basketball plays which people think should have been called travels but weren’t. Here’s one good one.

Thanks for the questions,
Ezra

What does it mean for football to get a hot stove?

Every avocation has its own language and sports is no different. There’s a particular language that sports fans become conversant with and fluent in over the course of years. Like all languages, it’s difficult for an outsider to understand. This is a shame because there’s no reason for sports to be an exclusive society. Twitter, with its 140-character limit only magnifies the difficulty for casual fans or non-fans to understand what someone is saying about sports. There’s no room, even for the most open and thoughtful sports fan, to explain all the terms they’re using or the implications of what they’re saying. Today, I’m going to take one tweet from Wall Street Journal writer Kevin Clark and unpack it.

Let’s start with the what is probably the most immediately confusing phrase in this tweet: “hot stove.” What does a kitchen appliance have to do with sports? Hot stove is a phrased used to refer to the movement of players from team to team during a time when a sports league is not actively playing games and the rampant and excited speculation among fans that potential or real player movement creates. According to Wikipedia, this term “dates from nineteenth-century small town America when, during the winter, people ‘gathered at the general store/post office, sat around an iron pot-bellied stove, and discussed the passing parade. Baseball, along with weather, politics, the police blotter and the churches, belonged in that company’.” Players can move from one team to another by signing a contract with a new team when they are at the end of a contract and are therefore free agents or by being traded to another team while under contract.

Now that you know what a hot stove is, the next step is to understand why football hasn’t traditionally had one. There are a couple reasons for this. One is specialization. Football is the most highly specialized sport. Players can not only just play one of the dozen or so positions on the field but they usually are best in a particular offensive or defensive scheme. As opposed to basketball, hockey, or certainly baseball, transitioning from one team’s system to another is way more painful in football. There are lots of examples of good players moving from one team to another and never regaining the success in a new system that they had in their first. Another reason is power. The NFL is the most lopsided of the major American sports leagues when it comes to the power dynamic between players and teams. NFL teams can arbitrarily cut all but the best players and are usually able to get their way in contract negotiations. As a result, NFL players have traditionally had less power than in other leagues to ask for or force their team to trade them. The last reason is the salary cap. Unlike in the National Basketball League, where player contracts are all guaranteed and trades are often made for financial reasons, in the NFL, teams have the opportunity to cut their players if they don’t want to deal with counting their salaries towards the team’s cap.[1]

The NFL’s free agency period began yesterday and with it came an unprecedented slew of player signings and meaningful trades. The Philadelphia Eagles have led the way by trading a star running back to Buffalo for a young linebacker and a draft pick and then following that up by swapping quarterbacks and draft picks with the St. Louis Rams. Right behind them in terms of timing and significance were the Seattle Seahawks who acquired the outstanding tight end, Jimmy Graham from the New Orleans Saints. The Miami Dolphins signed controversial but effective defensive lineman Ndamukong Suh to a massive free agent contract and the New York Jets traded for wide receiver Brandon Marshall and signed free agent cornerback, Darrelle Revis. These moves came in quick succession and their perceived importance brought football writers and fans everywhere to their computers in droves where they registered their thoughts, complaints, and excitement.

The last thing to unpack in this tweet is Clark’s suggestion that other sports leagues “should shut down” if the NFL’s player movement becomes exciting and plentiful. This is likely a somewhat hyperbolic statement but there’s some truth to it. The NFL is already by far the most popular sport in the country and when it is in season, it’s hard for other sports to get attention from sports fans. Luckily for them, the NFL only plays from September to February. Beyond those times, only the NFL draft in late-April/early-May generates enough excitement among football fans to draw attention away from other sports. If there were more player movement between teams, like there was yesterday, it would extend the period of NFL obsession even further and that would damage the ability of other sports to have their time in the spotlight.

Twitter is a powerful platform for facilitating communication but it does sometimes make hard-to-understand comments impossible. If you see a sports tweet you don’t understand, send it to dearsportsfan@gmail.com and I’ll be happy to explain it.

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. Note that this is a gross simplification. Salary cap rules are bewilderingly complicated. It’s a simplification but it’s directionally correct.↵

What's a goalie? Why are they so crazy?

Dear Sports Fan,

Why do people say goalies are crazy? What’s a goalie anyway?

Thanks,
Jean

Dear Jean,

When I was in middle school, I discovered ice hockey. I remember lying on my bed and watching games on a little square television at my Dad’s house. Even back then, I felt compelled to jot down interesting things I heard, as if I was preparing to write a blog, despite this being years before blogs existed and decades before I started Dear Sports Fan. I still have some of the quotes I wrote down. One of them was about goalies:

Some people say 90% of goaltending is mental. I say 90% of goaltenders are mental!

I’m not positive who said that but it’s a safe bet that it was John Davidson, a former NHL goalie who was then the color commentator for the New York Rangers. He and partner Sam Rosen were definitely the most common hockey voices in my early memories of the sport. Goaltenders or goalies are frequently described as being a little bit crazy. It’s unclear whether the position attracts players who are a little bit… different or whether the position takes normal people and twists them. My guess is that it’s a little bit of both. In order to appreciate the colorful nature of goalies, it’s important to understand what the position entails.

The position of goaltender exists in many sports: soccer, ice hockey, field hockey, lacrosse, team handball, and water polo. In each sport, the goalie is the most specialized position. She exists solely to do whatever she can to prevent the other team from scoring. Usually the goalie is granted special privileges in order to help them in their task. The most dramatic of those is in soccer where the goalie is the only player who can use his hands. In ice hockey, the goalie gets to wear thick leg pads, a large chest protector, a catching glove on one hand and a blocker and wide stick in the other. An ice hockey goalie also has special rules which apply only to her, including protection against being hit. Lacrosse goalies are allowed to have sticks with much larger heads than other players to make it easier to block shots with them. Water polo goalies are allowed to touch the ball with two hands and even touch the bottom of the pool.

You might think all those extra privileges make goalie the easiest position to play. Not true! The extra privileges of the goalie in most sports are a recognition of how difficult their job is. The margin of error for goalies in lower scoring sports (which is most goalies because, not coincidentally, there’s a strong correlation between having a goalie and having a low-scoring sport) is tiny and the consequences for error are enormous. Take poor Robert Green, for instance. In 2010 he was one of the best 40 people in the entire world at his profession yet all he will be remembered for (literally, it’s going to be the first line of his obituary one day) will be this momentary lapse against the United States in the World Cup. Hockey goalies who save 90% of the shots they face are probably not going to last long in the NHL where the best goalies save over 92.5% of the shots they face. Compare that to a non-goalie who scores on 20% of the shots he takes and is celebrated as an extraordinary goal-scorer. Even in a relatively high scoring sport like team handball, where, according to the New York Times, a goalie “can allow as many as 30 goals and still be thought to have had a good game” being a goalie comes with its down-side. Goalies are so frequently injured by shots that the international federation in charge of the sport is considering changing its rules to reduce injuries.

The challenges and pressure that goalies face seems to attract or create two types of people: those who compensate through obsessive behavior and those who compensate through aberrant behavior. Almost all goalies are one of the two types, some are both. Hockeygrrl lists some of the more well-known obsessive behavior in her post about hockey goalies, including Patrick Roy’s refusal to let anything, even ice shavings into his net, Henrik Lundqvist’s ritual of tapping the wall the same number of periods he’s played so far in the game, and my new favorite, Jocelyn Thibault’s tradition of pouring “water over his head precisely six-and-a-half minutes before a game began.” For the more far-out their behavior on the other side of the spectrum, see Colombian soccer goalie Rene Higuita, who was literally nicknamed “the lunatic” and hockey goalie Ilya Bryzgalov who once responded to a question about the offensive threats on an opposing team by saying that he was “only afraid of [a] bear.”

No matter how you cut it, goalies are some of the most important and most colorful people in sports.

Thanks for reading,
Ezra Fischer

What does advantage mean in soccer?

Dear Sports Fan,

What does advantage mean in soccer? I hear things like “the referee is playing advantage” or “has called advantage” but I don’t know what that means.

Thanks,
Gilbert

Dear Gilbert,

Soccer refs are the most powerful officials in any sport. Many important elements of the game, including the official game clock, are completely at the discretion of the ref. Advantage is one of those powerful elements of responsibility that require discretion on the part of the ref. When a foul is committed, the ref can decide to stop the game immediately or allow the game to continue interrupted if doing so would be better for the team that has just been fouled than stopping the game and giving them a free kick. This makes sense but it does ask a lot from the referee. He or she has to make a snap decision after each foul. Which team has the ball? If it’s the team that just got fouled, are they on the attack? How good of a chance do they have to score? Where was the foul committed? Would a free kick from that spot be likely to create a good scoring chance? How good of a scoring chance would it be? Would the team that just got fouled have a better chance to score by letting play continue or by stopping it and giving them a free kick? All of that calculation must be done in an instant. If the ref decides to call the foul, he will blow his whistle and stop the game. If not, she will straighten her arms out in front of her in what I would call a robot-giving-a-hug position to signal that there was a foul but the teams should continue to play. To add to the complexity of the decision, a good ref will also take into consideration whether or not the foul was worth giving a yellow or red card for and the general level of hostility between the two teams. If the ref decides to discipline the offending player with a card, he can still call advantage but must give the player the card as soon as the next time play stops. If a game is getting out of hand though, and the foul was a rough one, a ref may decide to stop the game and give the card immediately to avoid escalating violence.

Soccer is not the only sport that cooks the idea of advantage into their rules. Ice hockey has what they call a delayed penalty rule. Fouls are not called against a team until they gain control of the puck. This way, a team that is about to be advantaged by a foul call can keep trying to score until they lose control of the puck. This is why, when there is a delayed foul call coming, the team with the puck will quickly try to sub their goalie for another attacking player. They can’t be scored against (unless they make the terrible mistake of passing the puck back into their own net) because as soon as the other team touches the puck, play will be stopped and a penalty will be called. In American football, most penalties are announced after a play is over. A team that has been fouled has the choice of whether to accept the penalty or decline it and allow the result of the play to stand. In other words, a team that scores a touchdown despite being fouled does not have to wipe the touchdown off the scoreboard and take the smaller advantage of a five yard penalty.

All three of the rules help reduce the chances of a player intentionally fouling another to prevent her or her team from scoring. If a player were able to immediately nullify the play by committing even the most minor infraction, intentional fouls would happen all the time in these sports. Advantage is soccer’s best attempt to provide the maximum possible deterrent against fouling, whether that’s by blowing a whistle to stop the game or allowing the game to continue uninterrupted.

Thanks for reading,
Ezra Fischer

 

How does scoring work in golf?

Dear Sports Fan,

How does scoring work in golf?

Thanks,
Ian

Dear Ian,

Scoring in golf is dead simple but that fact is obscured by the unnecessarily complicated language that golf uses to talk about scoring. It’s not all bad though, golf’s language is actually pretty enjoyable and easy to learn. Plus, the way that golf thinks about scoring expresses something about the essence of the sport which is useful to understand. We’ll run through how the scoring works and then explain how to talk about golf scores.

In any golf competition, the player who gets the ball into the hole in fewer hits, wins. It’s that simple! Whether you’re talking about a single hole, an 18-hole round, or a tournament which is usually four rounds of 18 holes each, the player who can complete play using the fewest number of strokes is the winner. Things can get more complicated with various team formats, many of which I explained in my post about the Ryder Cup, but the concept is always the same — use the fewest swings possible.

By now you might be wondering why, if the scoring concepts are so simple, the words used to talk about the score is so complicated. When you watch golf on TV or get into a conversation with golfers, you hear a lot of strange words like “par,” “birdie,” “eagle,” and “bogie.” Huh? Here’s the deal. Three concepts will make all of those vocabulary words make sense.

  1. Every golf hole and course are unique and of varying difficulty.
  2. Golf is designed to work equally well as a competitive sport played against other golfers and a puzzle played individually.
  3. No more than four players can play on a single hole simultaneously, so in any large competition, play is staggered across several hours. Despite this, both for the golfers and for fans, a way of expressing the standings at any moment is needed.

Golf’s solution is to express score in a relative way. Every hole on every course is given a number of strokes that the designers of the course think that an excellent golfer should be able to complete the hole in. That number is called par and is generally from three to five strokes. Instead of saying that a golfer used four hits to successfully complete a hole, her score is expressed relative to par. Here’s where the vocab words come in:

  • Par – Derived from the latin word meaning “equal,” par means that a golfer finished a hole in the number of strokes the course designers expected him to.
  • Birdie – A birdie is finishing a hole in one fewer stroke than expected.
  • Eagle – Once birdie was established as the term for one better than par, golf took off on the bird metaphors in that direction. An eagle is two shots better than par.
  • Albatross – An albatross, as you might have guessed, is three shots better than par. It’s very, very unusual.
  • Bogey – A bogey is the opposite of a birdie. A player who has shot a bogey has taken one more stroke than par to complete a hole. There are no separate words as players use more and more strokes to finish a hole, the way to express it is by adding a modifier before the word bogey. Two strokes worse than par is a double-bogey, three a triple-bogey, four a quadruple-bogey, and five a dear sports fan special. Just joking, I guess you’d call that a quintuple bogey…

The purpose of this is not to confuse beginners! Think back to our three principles of golf. Expressing scores relative to an ideal, almost platonic score that’s set for each hole and course is a remarkably effective way of making golf an exciting challenge even if played alone. Without needing to compare your score to a competitor’s, you can judge how well you’re doing. Shoot a birdie? Celebrate! Hit a double-bogey, cry a single tear and move on. If scores were simply expressed in an absolute way — five shots for a particular hole — there would be no way for a solitary golfer to know if she did well or poorly. As a bonus, by setting a par particular to each course, a golfer can move from course to course and still compare his play to previous rounds on other golf courses. Sure, the course he played today may have been more difficult than the one he played on a week ago, but if its par was set correctly, it was higher. Shooting par should be equally difficult on every course in the world.

The other element of genius to the relative approach to scoring is that it doesn’t matter where a golfer is on a course, you can always create a leaderboard by using their scores relative to par. Golfer A who has finished all 18 holes of a round and completed them in two shots more than par has a score of +2 or two over par. Golfer B who is halfway through the course and has used one fewer shot than expected so far has shot one under par or -1. Golfer C who just played the first hole and completed it in the expected number of strokes is currently at par or 0. You can line these golfers up easily to see who is winning at the moment.

  1. Golfer B — -1
  2. Golfer C — 0
  3. Golfer A — +2

Golfers B and C are still playing and can improve their score or mess up and make it worse while Golfer A is done and can do nothing but wait and watch but by using relative scoring, we can rank them at any moment of the day to see who is winning.

Hopefully this all makes sense out of the madness,
Ezra Fischer