Football... er... Soccer and Game Theory
A fun piece on soccer and game theory, and how sometimes it makes sense to score on yourself (or at least it used to) - worth the read.
Interesting. Would have been great if they had a clip of the team defending both goals.
For one, it's pretty hard to stop a team from scoring an own goal if they really want to. Why wouldn't their goalie just catch it and run it in?
This is not yet the odd part of the match. The Grenada players, initial shock abating, developed their own strategy. If they could score on Barbados in the waning minutes, they would win the match and advance. But, if they could score a goal on themselves, they would lose by one goal which was still enough to advance.
This doesn't make sense to me, because if they won they would advance and if they lost they would advance then surely if they tied they would also advance... Was it their strategy to push for a defining loss or win before an OT goal that would count for two against them? So if they lost in OT they would not advance and that was the only way they would not advance?
OT goals counted double for some reason. Grenada would advance as long as they didn't lose by two. So if they lose by 1 in regulation, they're fine. But if it's tied and they give up an OT goal, now they lose by "two". And that would give Barbados the tiebreaker. Essentially, Barbados scored on themselves deliberately to give themselves an extra half hour to get the goal they needed to advance.
Because I originally wasn't going to click here thinking it was just going to be something that let people unfamiliar with soccer know a little bit about styles of soccer and just basic ideas. This, however, is an interesting article about something that I had never heard of, and is pretty funny.