I BLAME the brother. Half way through a blistering match of Sensible Soccer, he thought aloud: "Wouldn't it be great if real football on TV had a map of all the players?"
Like many other footie games on computers, Sensible Soccer focuses on the portion of the pitch, where the ball is, but a little map in the corner of the screen lets you keep track of all the players.
If real life games had this facility, the moving dots would give armchair supporters an instant picture of whether Mick McCarthy had truly adopted a "Continental style" formation, or how unbalanced Newcastle United's right flank became when they played Asprilla instead of Keith Gillespie last season.
The brother's initial idea was to put a small radio transmitter in each player's boots (or on a wristband), and have two receivers on different sides of the pitch to triangulate their positions. His next idea was better still: instead of using fragile radio transmitters, have a fixed camera to cover the entire pitch, then feed a frame per second into a computer. Next, subtract all the colours except the two teams' strips (and, perhaps, the bail), and convert these coloured blobs into neat little pixels.
Such a system, particularly with an overhead camera, could also detect whether someone was offside, whether the ball was over the line and so on. Unlike the current obsession with useless statistics - particularly on Sky Sport - the system would give a fluid, dynamic and much more meaningful picture of what is happening on the pitch. Pundits and team managers alike could analyse animations of the patterns, or composite pictures traced by each moving blob. It would be the biggest fundamental change in live coverage of soccer since the action replay . . .
WHILE all this might seem farfetched, one innovation in the Euro 96 coverage is a "heat map". It, too, will keep track of key players and formations, but unlike the brother's idea it involves a lot of manual labour. Four "spotters" around the ground will be equipped with pressure sensitive tablets which represent the pitch. The spotters will identify the player on the ball and his position, and feed this information into their Digital notebook computers. Then the data is sent over a 500 metre fibre optic network to two PCs beside the TV production suite.
The database is converted into various statistics throughout the game. And at half time they will generate a "heat map" - not an infrared picture but a three dimensional graph of the playing patterns.
Providing the hardware for Euro 96 are Digital (the computers) and BT (the ISDN links to connect some 3,000 machines across England). Microsoft is also heavily involved in the £10 million project: Bill Gates's software empire wants to prove that a decentralised world of connected PCs rather than the traditional solution of large mainframe computers controlling everything from one central HQ - won't result in total chaos.
TALKING of chaos, scientists at the University of Wales Institute in Cardiff have been applying the mathematical rules of Chaos Theory to football with results that are TRULY AMAZING! (as John Motson might say).
In a nutshell, Chaos Theory shows how apparently random phenomena such as the weather systems and stock markets have an underlying order.
Drs Keith Lyons and Mike Hughes have spent more than a decade collecting data from matches, to reveal the underlying patterns of play. Using notational analysis" techniques, they have transferred each game from vided onto computer generated grids, noting each action by the players (where they pass, how far they kick, where they run etc) and building a computer model of each team's patterns of play. On paper, a soccer match ought to be a very random affair, because the 22 players have a huge range of potential choices. In reality, though, successful teams exhibit well established patterns of play. "Their actions, such as passing, defending and shooting, show invariance which provide, football matches with a pre ordained course," Hughes told New Scientist. "Yet amid the patterns there are perhaps four or five occasions when the game deviates from this rigid structure."
Hughes and Lyons believe if teams can create and exploit these chaotic moments, or perturbations", they'll be more likely to win.
Examples of perturbations are the occasional flashes of brilliance from star players like George Best and Eric Cantona. Or Willie Carr's famous donkey kick in 1970, when he stood with the ball between his legs and flicked it up behind him with both heels. Or, more recently, Nayim of Real Zaragoza's breathtaking goal just before the final whistle in last year's European Cup Winners' Cup final: he noticed the Arsenal goalie David Seaman was off his line, and in a completely unexpected move he shot from the halfway line.
By studying the patterns of, an opponent's game, the scientists reckon it should be possible to create perturbations to disrupt it. Perturbations can also affect teams over the course of an entire season or more - even the tiniest tweak to a system can bring enormous and unpredictable results. This is the so called "butterfly effect" - where a butterfly flapping its wings in Old Trafford can lead to a hurricane liner, Mick McCarthy's back garden.
Lyons and Hughes discovered that a disruptive influence such as a new player (e.g. Asprilla at Newcastle last season) or attempting to adopt a new style of play (as the England and Republic of Ireland squads are both doing at the moment) can push a team out of equilibrium into chaos. Over time, the team then settles into a new phase of equilibrium which may be more or less successful than the first. The right kind of chaotic phase, they reason, should ensure the team a brighter future.
"If you play with exactly the same rhythm all the time, you've no surprises left," Dr Hughes says. "With English, or British, football, we've opted from the 1950s and 1960s for the long ball game. This is one way of creating an element of chaos, but it's only one way.
"For a short time this kind of tactic may be very successful, but opposing teams quickly learn bow to deal it and then you're no longer creating any chaos."
While all this might seem like second nature to your average football fan, the techniques do bring a much more scientific approach to the game. Dr Hughes, who supports Everton, is optimistic about England's prospects in Euro 96.
I think they stand a very good chance," be said before Saturday's scrappy draw with Switzerland. "The most critical time for England will be when they, play Scotland, because that game's going to be absolute chaos."
