Sportsound Watch

[welshbairn 19,067]

Levein trying to hide from his responsibility by continually blaming everyone else for what happened to his team is embarrassing. No idea what he thinks he's gaining by it, apart from occasional gigs on Sportsound and being mates with Tom English. 

[craigkillie 13,892]

17 hours ago, Aim Here said:

Firstly, footballers are under more severe restrictions than the general public, precisely because they're spending so much time in relatively large groups, and then travelling across the country and mingling with other large groups, and the perceived infection risk is so high. That's part of the reason why football is allowed to proceed. You can't compare footballers to the general public since they're in a different category and a different regime.

Secondly,  you're onto a loser trying to minimise the effects of the issue of player behaviour when, of the 9 players who we know broke the rules, two of them actually contracted the virus.. Everyone they came into contact with was put at risk of catching it. All it would have taken is for a test to come up with a false negative (medical tests are far from infallible) or for them to be as lax about testing as they are about obeying the other guidelines and they'd have sparked off another outbreak. As well as there being a risk of catching the virus, there's the risk that some of your safety measures don't work. Here one measure - telling the players to not go out and be dafties - failed, but another - testing - happened to work. That's no argument at all for being more relaxed about the measures. If anything, it's a wake-up call to be more strict because one of your measures has been shown to be inadequate, and you do need some level of redundancy in your safety systems.

The only countries of any size which have had a much higher prevalence of coronavirus deaths in the general population are Belgium and Peru. The UK's response to the virus has already been inadequate.

And I suspect you're not an epidemiologist - you haven't studied at all the possible vectors by which people catch the virus, you couldn't tell me how many people catch the virus in restaurants as opposed to airports or public buses or offices, and you can't tell me what proportion of the population plays football and what proportion of the time they spend doing that. It's not surprising you haven't heard of people catching the virus from one relatively minor pastime which was pretty much shut down across the world once the pandemic kicked in. You haven't looked.

Even if you had, you can't immediately go from 'I don't know of any cases caught from football' to 'Playing football is a safe activity'. You have to divide by the fraction of the population that plays football under the coronavirus restrictions and again by the fraction of time they spend playing football. If only one person in a country of 300 million dies from playing Russian roulette in a given year, that doesn't mean that playing Russian roulette is safer than cancer or crossing the road - it's far more likely that not a lot of time is spent engaging in Russian Roulette.

We know what spreads coronavirus. It's respiratory activity - breathing, coughing, sneezing - in close proximity to another human being, or touching items that have been sneezed/breathed/coughed on - including other people.  There's a lot of that in football. It would be a huge surprise - approaching being  contrary to common sense - if it wasn't a risky activity - at least without all the safety precautions being taken to make it less dangerous.

There isn't actually any evidence that footballers are under more severe restrictions than the general public - as far as anyone has been able to gather, the Aberdeen players were simply guilty of breaking the exact same rules that apply to everyone else, namely meeting with more than three households indoors. Right at the start when players returned to training while we were basically in lockdown there was definitely an expectation that they essentially self-isolated, but this appears to have been relaxed as the rest of the country came out of lockdown.

I have no idea what your argument about Belgium and Peru has to do with anything - the overall prevalence of covid since March is completely irrelevant, I am talking about the here and now. The prevalence of the disease in the general population in Scotland right now is much lower than it was in many of the European countries when they returned in June/July. Despite your suggestion to the contrary, I have actually been following the restart in most other European countries because I'm a bit of a geek like that. Something like 44 countries returned in June/July to complete their 2019/20 seasons (or to start their 2020 summer seasons), and there were only a small number of examples of clubs having to postpone games due to outbreaks. Of these, I'm not aware of a single one instance of the disease being passed from one team to the other.

I've already said this on another thread already, and I'm reluctant to keep mentioning it in case I sound like I'm boasting, but I do literally have a PhD in disease modelling. I'd generally describe myself as a statistician, but I have spoken at epidemiology conferences in the past and could definitely describe what I do as epidemiology. It's important to note that I didn't study infectious disease, but I do like to think that I understand risk factors and relative risk better than the average person. This doesn't make the actual crux of your argument any less valid, but it perhaps means that you can make the argument without the implication that I don't understand risk and that I've just jumped into my point of view without actually thinking about it.

I don't think there has ever been any doubt that playing football is a high-risk activity compared to many other things people do, and that's precisely why we stopped doing it for about 5 months, but there comes a time when the overall risk has been mitigated to a sufficient degree that we can begin to tentatively restart such activites (as has happened in many other non-essential industries). If the experience in Scotland proves to be vastly different from pretty every other country in Europe and we start to see outbreaks as a direct result of football, then we can look at stopping it again.

Edited August 20, 2020 by craigkillie

[Steve McQueen 598]

Scott Allan must be the most overhyped player in Scottish football.

Can't get a game for Hibs atm but should be playing for Scotland apparently.

[Rodhull 945]

McIntyre asking Warburton if it was still his dream to come back and manage Rangers again was pretty cringe.

[tarapoa 1,065]

McIntyre asking Warburton if it was still his dream to come back and manage Rangers again was pretty cringe.

You're kidding right?  That would have to be a candidate for one of the most delusional questions ever fielded.

 

[TheScarf 10,011]

9 hours ago, Rodhull said:

McIntyre asking Warburton if it was still his dream to come back and manage Rangers again was pretty cringe.

Hopefully Warburton replied;

’Um..........no?’

[bennett 3,410]

How long do we have to wait for the answer to the Warburton question?

 

[Green Day 3,657]

19 hours ago, bennett said:

How long do we have to wait for the answer to the Warburton question?

 

I prefer medium, but some people like the toastie.

[Junior_Arab 330]

At the risk of sounding sexist, having watched the highlights of Glasgow City vs Wolfsburg, you’ve got to question the value of the female players opinions on “elite” football. 

[Zen Archer Esq. 17,831]

4 minutes ago, Junior_Arab said:

At the risk of sounding sexist, having watched the highlights of Glasgow City vs Wolfsburg, you’ve got to question the value of the female players opinions on “elite” football. 

Some of my best friends are women.

[Lebowski 866]

At the risk of sounding sexist, having watched the highlights of Glasgow City vs Wolfsburg, you’ve got to question the value of the female players opinions on “elite” football. 

We should be listening to yours though due to your extensive experience of playing at World Cups and that though aye?

Women are as perfectly capable of coming out with absolute shite as men. Judge them on what they're saying.

[Loonytoons 1,168]

On 19/08/2020 at 13:33, Jackie Chiles said:

Hearts were the only team who had taken players off furlough. It's clearly not the same impact.

Is your argument a purely financial based issue then?  If so, it's strange that Hearts are stating that it's all about an unfair advantage to Hibs in the fairly distant  upcoming Scottish Cup tie.

Furlough or not, there are so may more teams than just Hearts that have been impacted by this decision.  Take the blinkers off please..

[itzdrk 7,683]

2 hours ago, Junior_Arab said:

At the risk of sounding sexist, having watched the highlights of Glasgow City vs Wolfsburg, you’ve got to question the value of the female players opinions on “elite” football. 

Talent-wise this would be similar to when Celtic played PSG.  The last time the scores were PSG 7-1 Celtic & Celtic 0-5 PSG.  

That Celtic team were unbeaten the previous season in Scotland (and lost 4 times domestically in the season in question) so I guess we could just rule out the entirety of our nation for football opinions whether male or female?

Edited August 22, 2020 by itzdrk

[craigkillie 13,892]

You don't have to have been a horse to be a jockey.

[Bose 260]

10 hours ago, Junior_Arab said:

At the risk of sounding sexist, having watched the highlights of Glasgow City vs Wolfsburg, you’ve got to question the value of the female players opinions on “elite” football. 

Having watched Barcelona v Bayern Munich I have to question if this Messi guy is even a football player. 

[Jackie Chiles 7]

11 hours ago, Loonytoons said:

Is your argument a purely financial based issue then?  If so, it's strange that Hearts are stating that it's all about an unfair advantage to Hibs in the fairly distant  upcoming Scottish Cup tie.

Furlough or not, there are so may more teams than just Hearts that have been impacted by this decision.  Take the blinkers off please..

No, my point was Darryl Broadfoot trying to deflect an argument framing it as all about Hearts,when Hearts were impacted in a unique way.

Obviously other teams were impacted but I'm not convinced there was any risk of letting Hearts continue training.

Agree on this having little impact on the Semi Final but then you have to agree on same basis, that letting Hearts continue training but other Championship teams not start, had little advantage to Hearts, given the season start was so far away.

I'm not that bothered by this decision,  just think it was unnecessary.

[Have some faith in Magic 570]

English on about a second spike in Ireland. 

Stewart still whining about hearts training. Claiming that if hearts were allowed to train their fans wouldn't be raging any more. Aye right. 

 

[ropy 1,731]

Everyone can train from Monday, all this noise will die down.

Shurely?

[G-MAN 1,331]

Jane Lewis must be THE worst sports reporter ever on Sportsound.

Thick doesn’t even come close to describing her interviews today.

[Dunning1874 10,862]

Kettlewell being interviewed pre-match, back to the studio and Richard Gordon is having a right laugh about how Tom English wasn't listening to the interview as he was instead listing golf courses he'd like to go to.

Terrific coverage.