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Someone reading that title would be almost certain this is a political post, and not a post about Asian World Cup Qualifying. They’d, of course, be wrong. I’ll get to the update later on Thursday but a fascinating “life meets theory” moment evolved today when Saudi Arabia and North Korea came face to face…
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Giuseppe Rossi has claimed yet another victim: the servers at Big Soccer. Is there no end to his treachery? 🙂
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Asia finishes its group stages in a couple of days and Africa plays more matches in a week, but the rest of the world waits until August (South America until September). An important note: Iran plays an absolutely critical World Cup qualifier at South Korea in their final Group Stage match.
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This weekend qualifiers are over, so let’s see how everyone is faring going into the midweek matches. The full qualification chances for every team can be found here. The National Team Ratings can be found here.
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One of the best parts about making mistakes is it gives you opportunities for explanations. I’ve re-run the 10,000 simulations correcting the coding mistake which meant Scotland was always the 2nd place team in Group 9 in UEFA. So many of the changes in results are due to this adjustment. But some aren’t.
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Looking over my latest post (since removed since the numbers are a little wrong), something jumped out at me: of the 11 times the Netherlands didn’t win their group, they didn’t qualify from the playoffs a single time. This meant that either they had some really bad luck in those playoffs, or there was…
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So we had a few more qualifiers played, some friendlies to help assess team strength and now its time to update from our last installment. To review, I simulate the remaining World Cup qualifiers based on the Statistical National Team rankings I do and then assess the qualification chances of the remaining teams. The…
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Bill James’s remarks on the BCS are making all sorts of rounds on the internets, and when you do what I do it’s awfully hard not to pay attention to whatever Bill writes. This particular subject is important to me because I find the process of using statistical rankings to rank sports teams fascinating…
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A sincere and warm congrats to sabermetric fellow traveler Tommy Tango on his new consulting gig with the Seattle Mariners. Tommy’s first set of moves will be to replace Jim Presley at third with Edgar Martinez, install Ken Phelps as the fulltime DH, and use their first round draft pick on High School superprospect…
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A Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to everyone out there. When all you boys and girls dig in and start opening presents, be sure to avoid this pitfall: Merry Christmas!!