World Football Postulant

I still can’t remember to make my Bundesliga picks on Thursday, and as a result I always fail to pick the Friday game. This week, however, I know I would ahve picked Schalke to beat Koln, so even though I already know that Koln was able to beat Schalke, I’m predicting the game - an early loss for me.

This week’s stand out match-up is sees Bremen, fresh off their destruction of Bayern in Munich, hosting upstart Hoffenheim. I like Bremen to continue their goal scoring ways and Hoffenheim to ge their second major reminder that they are not quite in the league’s elite. Yet.

Reminder on scoring: Win - I predict the right result; Draw - I predict a winner, but it ends in a draw; Loss - Everything else.

September 13
Hertha Berlin 2-2 Wolfsburg (pick: Berlin, 2-1)
Hamburg 3-2 Bayer LEverkusen (pick: Hamburg, 3-2)
FC Koln 0-3 Bayern Munich (pick: Bayern 2-0)
Borussia Dortmund 3-3 Schalke (pick: Draw, 2-2)
Werder Bremen 3-0 Energie Cottbus (pick: Bremen, 4-1)
Hoffenheim 0-0 Stuttgart (pick: Hoffenheim, 3-2)
September 14
Hannover 5-1 Monchengladbach (pick: Hannover, 2-0)
Bochum 2-0 Bielefeld (pick: Draw, 2-2)

Results: 5 wins, 2 draws, 1 loss
Cummulative: 16 wins, 7 draws, 11 losses

September 20
Arminia 2-0 FC Koln (pick: Arminia 3-1)
Schalke 1-0 Frankfurt (pick: Schalke 3-0)
Borussia Monchengladbach 0-1 Hertha Berlin (pick: Draw, 1-1)
Energis Cottbus 1-1 Bochum (pick: Cottbus, 2-1)
Bayern Munich 2-5 Werder Bremen (pick: Draw, 2-2)
September 21
Hoffenheim 4-1 Borussia Dortmund (pick: Dortmund, 3-2)
Stuttgart 3-1 Karlsruhe (pick: Stuttgart, 3-1)
Wolfsburg 3-0 Hamburg (pick: Hamburg, 2-1)

Results: 3 wins, 1 draw, 4 losses
Cummulative: 19 wins, 8 draws, 15 losses

September 26-Pick
FC Koln 0-3 Schalke
September 27-Picks
Werder Bremen 4-2 Hoffenheim
Hannover 1-2 Bayern
Hamburg 2-0 Monchengladbach
Hertha Berlin 2-0 Energie Cottbus
Borussia Dortmund 3-1 Stuttgart
Bochum 1-2 Bayer Leverkusen
September 28-Picks
Frankfurt 1-2 Arminia Bielefeld
Karlsruhe 1-1 Wolfsburg

Frank Ribery has yet to appear for Bayern Munich this season.

In more injury news, Bayern Munich’s Franck Ribery, yet to appear for his club this season, has said he hope to make his return next week against Steaua Bucharest when München open Champions League play.

The German Footballer of the Year has been out all season recovering from an ankle injury suffered while playing for France in Euro 2008.  If he were to return next week, the three month recovery time would be very close to the short-end of the projection made when he had surgery at the beginning of summer.  The most pessimistic of original prognosis had the 25-year-old attacking midfielder out until November.  If Ribery’s hopes come true, he will have returned having missed only three Bundesliga matches and no Champions League play.

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Energie Cottbus is not going to be confused with a contender, but winning on the roas can never be taken for granted.  For a club that finished as low as Borussia Dortmund did in last year’s Bundesliga, any points are to be cherished, so a 1-0 win at Cottbus should not be sneezed at.  Dortmund controlled the entire match, and while there was one crowd-gasping moment in the last ten minutes when Cottbuss threatened after Dortmund bunkered in, Dortmund held on, build on last week’s point they got from Bayern, and showed why they should be considered amongst the league’s top six or seven teams.

With the victory, Dortmund remains one of the league’s three teams without a loss, sitting with Schalke 04 and Hamburger SV atop the table with 7 points.  Continue Reading »

When Arminia Bielefeld earned a point from Werder Bremen on the opening weekend, I chalked it up to Werder’s failing more than Arminia’s talents.  Without Diego, I thought Werder’s defensive problems easier to exploit. It was only in losing this week to Hamburg that I saw a club that could stay up.  They are near the bottom of the table now, and they did give back a two goal lead at home to Hamburg, in their winless three games to start the season, there is a skill in attack, a creativity, that will serve them better once they get away from Werder Bremen, Hertha Berline, and Hamburg SV.  Arminia Bielefield lost 4-2 to Hamburg on Saturday - their first defeat of the season - but in their loss they continued to show why they may join Hoffenheim in staying in going from promotion to survival in the Bundesliga.

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Any kind of panic Bayern supporters were about to embark on can be tabled after this weekend’s victory over Hertha Berlin.  Luca Toni looked like his normal healthy self.  Martin Demichelis returned to the lineup, with immediate effect.  Bastian Schweinsteiger continued to carry over his European Championship form.  Philip Lahm scored a beautiful goal, and even Miroslav Klose get on the scoresheet (albeit via penalty kick).  The league champions looked like the team Jurgen Klinsmann said would challenge for in the Champions League in picking apart Hertha Berlin, 4-1.

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Schalke got one of the missing midfielders back when Jermaine Jones returned to the lineup.  He looked active, created some chances running onto balls, and generally looked free of any lingering effects of his injury.  Jefferson Farfan and, Orlando Engelaar were still out, but against a Bochum team that is proving to be one of the less threatening in the league, it didn’t matter.  Schalke got an first-half goal from Heiko Westermann, his second of the season, and controlled the remainder of the match, earning a 1-0 victory.  It ended up being one of those matches where the better team flips a switch after going up.  Schalke was never really threatened.

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Aside from the top six teams in the league, I was not very familiar with the Eredivisie before going the research for these predictions.  As was the case when I forecasted the Bungesliga and the Portuguese Liga, I am somewhat ignorant of Dutch football.  That, however, will not stop me from trying to become a real follower, with this being my first stab.  To the right, you will see my prognostications for the upcoming season, which starts this weekend.

For these predictions, I used the same method I used for all my other previews.  I looked at every position on every team and asked how that player will effect the team’s goals for and goal against.  Once I had that, I was able to project a goals for, goal against ratio, with which I was able to simulate a double-round robin season.  I wrote a script to do this simulation and have used it for every prediction save Ligue 1’s.  For the Eredivisie, I ran the script 10,000 times to minimize the effect of any statistical noise.

And if that doesn’t make football sound boring, nothing will.

When you watch Eredivisie football, the thing which stands out is the wide-out play.  There are more teams playing three forwards in the Dutch league than anywhere else.  In addition, teams play very wide, attacking football.  This leads to a ton of goals.  The league had one team, Ajax, almost break 100 goals last season.  It is an athlete’s league, a scorer’s league, and almost the mirror image of football in Portugal.  You can see why so many players in this league make an easy transition to the Bundesliga.

Ajax added Marco van Basten and retained almost all of their key players.  They are in a great position to unseat four-time champion PSV Eindhoven, who lost Jefferson Farfan in addition to their starting goaltender, Huerelho Gomes.  PSV only finished three points ahead of Ajax last season and had a worse goal differential.  Having retained leading scorer and new captain Klass-Jan Huntelaar, added van Basten and Miralem Sulejmani (who scored 15 goals for Heerenveen last season).  This is the season where PSV - the Porto, Bayern, Lyon of the Eredivisie - slip to an Ajax side partly motivated by missing out on the Champions League thanks to the now discarded post-season playoffs.  As you can see to the right, I don’t think it will be particularly close.

That playoff format, used also in the Dutch second division (Eerste Divisie), is why a team that finished sixth amongst those vying for promotion finds itself in the Eredivisie.  ADO Den Haag won the promotion playoffs and like, FC Twente (who won the Eredivisie playoff to qualify for Champions League qualifying) looked out of their element against Arsenal, ADO Den Haag will look out of their element in the Eredivisie.

In between top and bottom, the team that has done the most to improve itself is AZ, a team that struggled (relatively) to score goals last season but brought in a series of scorers to help move them back into a UEFA Cup qualifying spot.  They should, at least, be competitive.

The one big surprise I have, after I ran the numbers, is Heerenveen.  In my simulations, there were basically as good as PSV.  I thought, in losing one of their three best goal scorers, they would take a step back from their fifth place finish, but as I looked closer a.) their fifth place finish seemed to understate their performance, and b.) other teams were regressing more than them.

But the story of this Eredivisie season will be at the top, where the league’s two storied clubs will against fight it out for the title.  I have Ajax finally breaking through, but as I mentioned at the onset of this post, what do I know?

One of the more exciting days of the European club football season is the day the Champions League group stage is drawn.

The 32 teams that have qualified for the group stage are drawn into eight, four-team groups.  Before that happens, all teams are broken into four pots, labeled A through D, where they are grouped according to a team’s strength (as determined by a formula called a coefficient).  Each of the eight groups can have no more than one team from each pot, no more than one team from a country.  The eight groups end up pretty even.

The draw is fun because you end up with a series of matches which, in addition to being high profile based on the quality of the teams involved, are rare.  In the days before the draw, you start considering the possibilities and potential story lines:  Chelsea and Fiorentina in a group, forcing Adrian Mutu to play the club he owes £14 million; Marseille being slotted with Arsenal months after having sold them Samir Nasri, and potentially getting Bayern Munich in the group, so they would have to face Franck Ribery; Barcelona being slotted with a Zenit St. Petersburg team whose star, Andrei Arshavin, so badly wanted to play at Camp Nou; FC Porto being grouped with Inter Milan and facing Jose Mourinho.

Here’s how the eight groups ended up being drawn, with the clubs listed in order of the group they were drawn from:  A to D.  Continue Reading »

It’s hard to look back on Week 1 given what’s on tap for the second week of the Portuguese Liga.  Benfica, coming off an embarrassing draw at promoted Rio Ave, have a chance to redeem the start of their season and go into the international break on a high note when they host Porto on Saturday.  With Porto off to another controlling start, Benfica will need a result lest they fall five points behind.

But first, let’s look back at last week’s picks.

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It as another week of unspectacular picks for me in the Bundesliga, where a number of ties make it hard for me to get any traction. The highlight, for me, was hitting the Dortmund-Munich game on the nose, though that’s a bit of a disingenuous boast, as I didn’t anticipate Mark van Bommel getting red carded. I probably should have seen that coming, though. It was the easiest prediction of the week.

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