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By Tony Attwood
It has always struck me that if the World Cup, which I don’t particularly care for since it invariably ends up injuring players I would like to see at full fitness during the regular season, is anything at all, it should be a summary of where we are now in football.
What it should not be, in my estimation, is a place to experiment with new equipment, new rules and new ideas. But this is what it becomes – for in this World Cup, we have the new ball. Indeed, so weird and wacky are the balls being used in the World Cup this summer that they become a story to themselves, ready to pop up when the game gets boring.
These balls arise from a discussion paper which has the title Orientation-Dependent Drag Crisis and Flight Response of the Fifa World Cup Match Ball Trionda, and its contents do not deviate from the outline. In layman’s terms, that I can just about understand the ball being used in the World Cup matches doesn’t behave as goalkeepers might expect. If you want the technical whatnot, there is a full article about the ball and what it does, here. And to be clear, this is not just some goalkeeper saying, “it’s not fair.” Rather, to quote from the article, we learn that “Researchers took the ball and fired it through a wind tunnel to measure the effect of aerodynamic forces upon it. They did so from six angles and found a consistent outcome.”
And that outcome was not what you or I or any other observer without detailed scientific knowledge would have expected. To quote from the article, “Regardless of where the ball was struck, if the ball reached a certain velocity, it would fly faster.” And this is not what the goalkeeper expects, nor indeed what physics predicts. Thus, the result is more goals and more unexpected results, and hence a bigger TV audience, and hence more income from sponsors and advertisers.
Indeed, researchers from two separate universities quoted in the article revealing all this have both agreed there is a technical effect built into the ball, so that when the ball is flying through the air, the way the air moves around the ball actually changes. This, rather unexpectedly, and probably contrary to anything you were ever taught in physics at school, changes the speed at which the ball moves, which fools both keepers and outfield players.
Now, where the ball behaves in a way that is not expected, even for a microsecond, it can mean the keeper or defender completely misjudges the ball, and it goes in the goal. Hence, more goals, which TV audiences like.
Obviously this is not the sort of thing the commentators are likely to deal with very much, since they are not especially known as experts in the physics of spherical objects, but even so the world cup organisaers have been taking no chances, for they have had a range of other stories lined up to feed to the ever susceptible journalists to keep them away from the “change of ball” story. In particular, this time around, we have the multiple tales of players playing for countries that they had adopted or who have adopted them, rather than the countries of their birth.
Along of course with some of the more commonplace crazy stuff like the headline “Witch doctor who ‘cursed’ Harry Kane lifts jinx after Ghana miss” with the subsequent note that “World’s ‘most powerful spiritualist’ says he will release hex on England captain.”
The point is of course that it doesn’t matter if any of these stories are true or not (and the issues with judging the speed of the ball are certainly real) but rather they distract from the fact that a lot of the time the games are not very good and countries we expect to win, do win, and the little countries we expect to lose, do indeed lose.
It is a bit like the non-league club getting through to the third round of the FA Cup and then being crunched. We all knew it was going to happen, but it still has to be turned into news somehow, perhaps with a tale about someone’s mother-in-law or the size of the ground, or the last time the non-league club beat a Championship club.
And this is the point of the World Cup. We might not be sure who is going to win, but the media still need some fun and games. They are, after all, committed to page after page of WC coverage, and there is a limit on the number of variations Thomas Tuchel can build into “we didn’t play particularly well, but we got through”.
