Rob Minto

Sport, data, ideas

Month: June 2017

Sport Geek #77: 15 from 1, 700th in the world, and nothingness

Good afternoon sports fans.

RUGBY / LIONS

As the Lions prepare for the second test, the greatest challenge in world rugby since last week, here are two questions to ponder. One, should the Lions pick 15 players from one team (via Economist)? In terms of results, it might be better; in terms of ethos, I say – what’s the point? The other is why the All Blacks are so good. The FT has a stab at answering.

GENDER TENNIS

Was McEnroe right to say that Serena would only be around 700 in the world on the men’s tour? To my mind, it’s a non-starter. Comparing across the sexes is pointless, and only gets people unnecessarily annoyed. Anyway, Vox has a good explainer here.

NFL ECONOMICS

How much is a quarterback really worth? Nobody actually knows, even with Derek Carr’s contract. Here’s a great rundown via the Ringer.

BASEBALL AND THE ABSENCE OF ACTION

What happens to a sport when nothing happens? Sports Illustrated gets existential.

BOXING

Remember when Mike Tyson took a chunk out of Evander Holyfield’s ear? the Guardian goes back in time.

Cheers

Sport Geek #76: meta-doc; clay GOATS; and living Gods

RUGBY (LIONS! LIONS!)

Not every sport makes a great documentary. Not every documentary is SO good that it is the subject of its own documentary. Living with Lions is that documentary.

NFL

The league just isn’t set up to cope with tanking. But that’s what’s going on. (BBC)

BOXING

I have yet to see an article that thinks the McGregor-Mayweather fight is a good idea. Here are two very different styles on saying why it’s very bad: dogshit (Deadspin) or idiocy (The Guardian).

NBA

How the Warriors duped the NBA (FiveThirtyEight). Or, put another way (via the Economist) how they have broken basketball.

Also: the truth about the hot hand. (ESPN)

TENNIS

The greatest clay-courter ever? A great piece comparing the achievements of Evert and Nadal on the red stuff. (Tennis.com)

BASEBALL

What does it feel like to get hit by a pitch? (ESPN)

FOOTBALL

How Iran’s success reflects the failures of Asian football. (Economist)

ICYMI

The Age of the Living God: Superstars are staying superstars for longer than ever. (The Ringer)

Numbers, racism, terrorism and the media: why we can’t get it right

Was the man who drove a van into the public in Finsbury last night (June 18) a terrorist? The question isn’t meant to be a racially-motivated one (we’ll come to that), but a question of numbers.

If three people plan an attack using a van and knives, that’s clearly terror. A lone man drives a car onto a pavement? Is that terror or just murder?

If terror requires an ideological target, then the car attack on Westminster Bridge was terror, and so was the attack on Muslims gathered after prayer. In fact, in both cases the attacker was shouting their motives out loud, so we don’t have to dig too deeply to ascribe a motive. But calling both men terrorists is deeply unhelpful.

The problem here is that if every racially-motivated attack is terror, where do we stop? We are in a constant reporting of a terror war, which only serves to inspire the extremists on both sides. Yet to call it (merely?) a hate crime is a big step, especially if the authorities are calling it terror.

To try and take terror out of the equation for lone attackers now is also a problem of the sequence of incidents. Muslim attacker (Westminster Bridge) = terrorist; White attacker (Finsbury) = hate crime. That’s not acceptable.

(Manchester was terror, no question – there was a network involved. Jo Cox’s murderer? He was tried for murder, but it was clear it was treated as a terrorist murder – this article explains the nuance.)

It’s also a question of race. Politicians are already striving for equivalence – look at Theresa May’s line that this attack was “every bit as insidious and destructive to our values and our way of life” as previous ones. That entire expression ‘every bit’ implies that you’ve already thought it – that Muslims are somehow fair game, as opposed to the people (more white, though not exclusively) in Borough Market. And that you need to check your racism at the door. This is the language of white privilege talking to an ethnic minority, and well-intentioned though it is, there is a code here. Saying ‘we care just as much’ is to assume that somewhere, there’s an assumption of less care, whether it’s you thinking it or me.

The problem that underpins all this is the breathless coverage. We need to move to a media environment where we think more along the lines of suicide reporting – more coverage is NOT a good thing.

It’s worth noting Simon Jenkins on the Westminster attack – his words are just as relevant today:

The actions of the authorities and the media in response to Wednesday have ramped up the hysteria of terror. This was ostensibly a random act by a lone player without access even to a gun. To over-publicise and exaggerate such crimes is to be an accomplice after the act. London’s response to the Westminster attack is an open invitation to every crazed malcontent to try it again.

There have been lots of calls to change our terror reporting. Looking at the coverage today, it’s clear no one is paying attention.

We are stuck in a cycle of labelling every attack as terror, unleashing 24-7 coverage and endless articles, and then wondering why it happens so often. I’d like to think there’s a way out of this dystopian mayhem, but if it starts with relying on the media to tone it down, don’t expect any progress.

Britain’s voting system is delivering what the public want

Hello hung parliament: Britain is back into deals and power arrangements, after just two years of Conservative majority. Another election in 2017 is a possibility if things fall apart.

The question I want to explore is this: is the first-past-the-post system (FPTP) delivering what voters want?

FPTP is one of the main criticisms of the UK political system. Each MP just needs to win the most votes in a seat, which can mean that they need to win far fewer than half the votes to be elected. That means smaller parties can pick up lots of votes, and get no seats, and results are skewed towards the winning party.

The most egregious example of this is the UK Independence Party – UKIP – in the 2015 election. With 12 per cent of the overall count – 3.8 million votes – they won just a single seat. FPTP clearly screwed UKIP in 2015.

This is nothing new. The Liberal Democrats have always suffered in this way, and their manifesto invariably contains a section on voting reform, moving to systems such as single transferable vote.

Whatever the merits of other systems, the question for the British people is not just about smaller parties. Does FPTP skew the result towards one or both of the two main parties, Conservative and Labour?

To assess whether FPTP is delivering an unfair outcome, the best measure is to look at the percentage of seats won compared to the percentage of votes won. This takes into consideration the different number of seats available in each election, and (importantly) voter turnout.

A perfect system would deliver a score for each party of 1. That would mean votes translate into seats at exactly the same rate. A score above 1 means the party gets more seats for their votes; a score less than one is the opposite, the party gets fewer seats per vote.

The Lib Dems have clearly suffered, with their scores in the last 10 elections running like this: 0.25, 0.16, 0.38, 0.44, 0.43, 0.42, 0.17, 0.15, 0.14, 0.13.

UKIP’s 2015 result was 0.01 – far worse than anything the Lib Dems have endured. (The Green party’s score in 2015 and 2017 was 0.04 and 0.10 – also a terrible ratio).

Some smaller parties lose out – that’s clear. Others do better – the Scottish National Party have in the last two elections got around 1.8 – in other words, close to twice the seats that their vote share suggests. Sinn Fein, the DUP and Plaid Cymru have also all scored above 1. The lesson is that smaller parties do well if their vote is concentrated in a region, rather than spread out over England.

But I think the bigger issue is whether the main parties are getting seats far out of proportion. That’s a more alarming question, as it has far greater impact on whether a party can force through legislation that half the country doesn’t want.

The latest election has in fact delivered the fairest set of results in the last 40 years (looking at the last 10 general elections). The Conservatives got 1.15 seat share per vote share; Labour got 1.01. This is the only time in the data that I’m looking at that the winning party was below 1.2. FPTP is not the problem here in terms of delivering voter intention. In fact, a hung parliament is exactly reflective of the votes cast. Continue reading

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