Football's just a branch of science

Written over a year ago, before DougieDougie etc...



In reaction to Celtic's dossier of dodgy refereeing decisions, I've
seen a few people recently say "any team could come up with a list of
decisions that have gone against their team". This led to me thinking
"Well, could they? if they could, would all the lists be equally
compelling?". It's easy to list anecdotal evidence from far-off cup
finals, but is there any way to make it more scientific?

I think there could be, but it would require a TV station to
orchestrate some scientific endeavour. Here is my experiment.

The TV company approach the most popular fans website for each SPL
team. They ask them to nominate incidents from this season's SPL where
they think that their team has been hard-done-by. let's say 20 per
team. how they decide on the 20 is up to them (an internet vote might
be hijacked by other teams, for example).

We now need to have these incidents evaluated by bona fide neutrals.
I'm going to assume that no-one in Scotland is neutral, not even Chick
Young.

So, the TV company go to mainland Europe and get people to rate them
for outrageousness. 0 being "the referee was absolutely right", 10
being "that goal in a Watford game that was well past the post". The
volunteer is shown a clip at random, and asked to rate it. this is
repeated till they get fed up. If a Falkirk incident against Hibs is
given a 10, Falkirk are given 10 points, and Hibs lose 10. each have
their "incidents voted on" increased by one.

after lots and lots of ratings, each team's average number of points
per incidents voted on is put in to a league table. those at the top
are the teams most sinned against, and those at the bottom, those most
favoured.

for people to do the rating, I would think people at five-a-side
centres would do, but if you want to increase the newsworthiness,
maybe people taking UEFA coaching classes would be better. but less
likely to volunteer, perhaps. foreign referees would probably still
back the referee, but having them as a different sample might be
interesting too.

this would of course involve people in said TV company going on a trip
to europe, but i don't think that should be a problem, somehow.

The results would lead to lots of discussion and hits on the relevant
website i'm sure, and would actually add to the sum of human
knowledge.

in short, it would be a bit like hotornot.com for refereeing
decisions. dallasorgallus if you will.

Until some sort of scientific measurement is attempted by the media,
the words "paranoia" and "conspiracy theory" should be stricken from
lexicon.

A reluctant football blog

I love football - it's the best game to watch, and I would (and will) go mad if I couldn't play it. I'm not really that keen on talking about it though. Almost everything interesting to say about formations etc, I have said by the age of 22. And to talk about football I have to pretend to give credence to other people's opinions on football, which is rarely the case. If I was living in France and a fan of PSG or whoever I don't think I would ever feel the need to write about it.

For that reason I'm not on any football forums (fora, in case John Bollan is reading this). Only when DougieDougiegate took off on twitter did I become active because it seemed more like campaigning that just opinions. (Sometimes too campaigny - sometimes permacampaigny). Football never makes me angry, really. I'm a Celtic fan, but when Celtic lose the league on the last day of the season makes me a bit grumpy, but doesn't necessarily ruin my day. I'm 36 and have never been booked. I'm by no means a firebrand. The things that do make angry and bias to do with Celtic, Rangers and religion, from fans, media, referees, and wider officialdom.

So, when i feel forced to write something here, it's likely to be on those topics, and not the photography stuff that went before, and proved rather fruitless

it was supposed to be the summer of george!

well, my sabbitical was rejected two days before it was due to start, so I am stuck where I was for the time being. nonetheless there has been progress.

I bought a number of prints in the hope of selling them; something of a risk as I have to guess which photos people will want prints of. oh and i've hardly ever sold any prints up until now.

anyway I bought a number of prints, some of which my sister then lugged to Barra to be sold in the hotel there.

you can (sort of) see a canvas wrap adorning the walls of the hotel in the picture on the right.

The majority of the shipment was made up of calendars. you can see the proofs here:


Some of the other prints were to be displayed in Austin Lafferty's offices, though currently they are in my flat.

all in all, I spent £386.61 of my own money on prints, plus £50 (so far) on frames. We'll see how much of that I can make back.

I've also arranged to do two more weddings, both next year. one is a guy from my work, who is going to pay for me to have a holiday in cyprus in exchange for taking photos of his wedding while I'm there. The other came as a result of the Orla pictures, the bride being a friend of her mother.

VAT

I don't have to register for VAT, until I make a certain amount of money, but I could voluntarily register for it if I wanted. I thought this would be a good idea because it would cost me less to get things printed. However, I now think I was wrong.

let's say it costs £10+VAT for me to get my calendars printed. that would be £12.50 at the moment, I think. If sell them for £20, then I would have to pay the VAT on profit. it wouldn't lead to the printing being any cheaper. therefore there's no advantage in volunteering for it.

all of this makes my calendars seem AWFULLY expensive.

registered

I've officially registered as self-employed, and applied for a separate bank account with smile. I haven't applied for any special status wrt to VAT and National Insurance yet; that may require some more thought

also, the powerleague might be interested in me taking some photos of their games after I sent them these photos of my game:

and I finished reading "Contemporary Wedding Photography" by Julie Oswin, which gave me a few ideas, some of which I'll ignore

sabbatical

I've officially applied for a sabbatical from the 1st of august until the 12th of october. we'll see if it's accepted.

a glut of updates.

things have been on a bit of a hiatus while I looked into the pension ramifications of taking a sabbatical. this took a ridiculously long time. it would seem that for most of my pension it wouldn't matter too much, and so I'm probably going to apply tomorrow.

one thing I forgot to mention the last time was that i sent my facebook/macbeth thing to a publisher in wales (they published a book in email format which i read a couple of years ago) who said to finish it and submit it. i sent them the existing bit because I don't want to spend ages finishing it if they don't like the idea. i haven't heard anything since.

i took photos of my friend Sonia's niece, Orla . I had great fun doing it (including saving the baby when it dived head-first off the couch). Her mum took a pile of business cards, and I've already had one approach about a wedding, and heard rumours about another (in Peterhead of all places).

I also met up with Colm and Catriona, who's wedding I'm doing in September, which made me feel awfully professional. And they were very easy to get on with, so I'm not worried about the wedding photos at all.

Today, I discussed selling prints in the windows of TV lawyer Austin Lafferty's offices. Which wasn't something I saw coming.