Thursday 7 June 2012

The players - age and experience

In my previous post I talked about the clubs players have come from, and the squads they're in. Here's a bit of personal stuff about the players themselves. How many caps they have, how old they are, who's got birthdays during the tournament, what rude words their names are anagrams of. The usual questions.

The most capped player is Iker Casillas, the Spanish goalkeeper. He has 129 caps, not bad for a 31 year old. In his day job, he plays for Real Madrid. If he gets hurt, they've got Barca keeper Valdez waiting in the wings with Liverpool's Pepe Reina. Not a bad choice, really. Who have we got again?

Second to Casillas comes Anders Svensen on 126 caps, then good old Shay Given on 121. Shay Given is an anagram of veiny gash, which tells us nothing. Ryan Giggs is an anagram of saggy ring, for that matter. With virtually every word in the English language having been co-opted into the world of double entendres, the odds on anyone's name having a vaguely suggestive anagram must be high.

 So it must be worth your time making some up. In the comments, please.

Moving on. 12 players in all have over 100 caps. None of them are English. England's most capped player is Ashley Cole, on 93.

10 players have no caps at all, including Jack Butland and Kaspar Schmeichel. 117 players have less than 10 caps, including 8 from England. The tournament average is 30.3 caps. England's average is 25.8.

The most experienced team are Spain, with 42.8 caps each, the least are Poland, with 20.2. This bodes well for Spain, less well for the Poles. On the other hand, you do start to wonder what happens to Spain when the golden generation retire.

After sending Walcott to the 2006 World Cup, Arsenal and England nearly provide the youngest player in the tournament again, with Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain, all of 18 years and 9 months old. This time though the honours go to Holland, with Jetro Willems of PSV, who’s seven months younger. Jetro’s family come from the Dutch Antilles, which used to be their equivalent of Gibraltar, inasmuch as hardly anyone knew how they came by them, but everyone was certain they couldn’t manage without them now. Then they got their independence, and it all turned out perfectly well. Just saying.

We’re almost guaranteed to see more of Willems and Oxlade-Chamberlain than we did of Walcott back then. You may remember he was dragged along by Sven before any of us had really heard of him. In the end he never got on the pitch, even when Owen limped away after viciously tackling himself, then Rooney was sent off for backheeling someone in the balls. It hardly seemed worth giving him the time off school.

The oldest player, Kostas Chalkias of PAOK and Greece, is two months shy of twenty years older. Unsurprisingly perhaps, he’s a goalkeeper. Four out of the oldest ten players are goalkeepers. Whereas the average tournament player is 27 years and 177 days old, the average goalkeeper is 406 days older.

22 players have a birthday during the tournament. Kamil Grosicki of Poland will be 24 on the day of their first game, the tournament opener against Greece. Should Greece top the group, Kastos Katsouranis would get a quarter final on his 33rd birthday. Frank Lampard will be 34 the day after England’s last group game, so let’s all hope he isn’t celebrating it on a plane (I wrote several days ago, when it might have mattered where the hell Frank Lampard was flying to). 4 players could get birthday semifinals, most plausibly Samir Nasri on his 25th.

No-one gets a final on their birthday, except my mate Toby, who probably won’t be playing. Unless they need a band.

So there's all your stats. Bring on the football.

4 comments:

  1. So, 4 games in, are we going to get what we came for?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Patience, it's happening. There's a tradeoff between quality and delay that I haven't resolved yet.

    ReplyDelete