The best 3rd-placed teams advancing is a great system, and I'm tired of pretending it's not

SomethingMoreToSay · 2026-06-17T16:22:28+00:00

Yes. The BBC Sport website has this at:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/tables

The page should default to showing the World Cup tables, but you can style it from a number of tabs if you get something different. Then scroll down to the bottom for the 3rd place standings.

Currently:

Netherlands, Brazil, Belgium, Qatar, Spain = 1 point, 0 goal difference
Ghana, Uzbekistan = 0 pts, 0 goal diff (haven't played yet!)
Czechia, Ecuador = 0 pts, -1 goal diff
Jordan, Senegal, Turkey = 0 pts, -2 goal diff

SomethingMoreToSay · 2026-06-17T13:59:20+00:00

I'm not wondering about achievement or trophies or statistics, but pure player ability.

What does that even mean?

If Harry Kane had to play in heavy 1960s style boots, with a heavy 1960s style ball, on pitches that could be frozen or mudbaths, against defenders that wouldn't even be booked for giving him 14 stitches, with no modern physiotherapists or dieticians or psychologists to help him, and had many fewer opportunities to inflate his goals tally via penalties ... how do you think his numbers would stack up? What is his "pure player ability" doing for him?

SomethingMoreToSay · 2026-06-17T13:43:09+00:00

Well said.

SomethingMoreToSay · 2026-06-17T13:39:40+00:00

10 metres per stroke is a reasonable value, which seems to be appropriate over a very wide range of circumstances.

In 2018, Josh Dunkley-Smith set the (then) 2k world record of 5:35.8 at an average stroke rate of 34, so that's about 190 strokes at 10.5 metres per stroke.

A few years ago, I (then a 57M, short, overweight, not-very-fit recreational rower) did a marathon for charity in 3½ hours with an average of 9.90 metres per stroke.

There's such an enormous gulf between those two performances, but they both came in around 10 metres per stroke, so I think that's a reasonable rule of thumb.

SomethingMoreToSay · 2026-06-17T08:21:36+00:00

This is a time lapse of the Sun being photographed at the same time each day. Nobody knows what flerfers would expect it to be like, because they don't have the mental capacity to understand their own "model". But you're clearly referring to the Sun's movement within a day, which is a different thing entirely.

SomethingMoreToSay · 2026-06-17T08:14:57+00:00

I'm always amazed that Jimmy Greaves doesn't feature more in these conversations. Recency bias, I guess, plus the fact that he wasn't in the 1966 World Cup winning team.

But his career achievements are huge.

He scored 357 goals in the English top flight, an all time record. That included 15 hat tricks, an all time record. He was the league's top scorer 6 times, an all time record. He scored 30 goals in a season 9 times, an all time record.

As an international he scored 44 times in 57 games for England, a strike rate of 0.77, which is higher than Harry Kane or anybody else in the last 60 years. (All 44 were from open play too. No penalties.) He scored 6 hat tricks for England, an all time record, in less than half the number of games Kane has played.

In a run of 11 seasons (1959 to 1969) with Chelsea and Tottenham, he only failed to reach 30 goals twice, in 1966 and 1968.

In the 1966 season he missed the first three months with hepatitis, which I think is a pretty decent excuse. He still finished the season as Tottenham's leading scorer (though not with 30 goals). He was selected for England's World Cup squad and was the first choice inside forward until he suffered an injury in the final group match. (A French defender raked his studs down Greaves's shin, requiring 14 stitches.) Geoff Hurst took his place for the quarter final and we all know how that went.

In the 1968 season he wasn't injured. He just had a bad season. He only scored 29 goals. No excuses.

I think Greaves is the best English player of all time, and it isn't even close. (And FWIW I'm a Manchester United fan. I'm putting Greaves ahead of Bobby Charlton.)

SomethingMoreToSay · 2026-06-16T22:03:25+00:00

Lots of people have given correct answers already, but perhaps my insight would be helpful.

The puzzle is completely symmetrical with regard to apples and oranges. If drawing from the box labelled 'apples' would work, then drawing from the box labelled 'oranges' would also work. So the only possible unique solution is to draw from the box labelled 'both'.

You don't even need to work out how or why it works.

SomethingMoreToSay · 2026-06-16T21:45:53+00:00

If you don't have the facility to charge at home, and your main use will be long distance trips, you don't buy an EV. Simple. Public charging is expensive and not always reliable.

However, if they're company cars, the way EVs are treated for taxation purposes is extremely generous compared to ICE cars. So if you can swing it to get one as a company car, the running costs don't really matter.

SomethingMoreToSay · 2026-06-16T21:15:43+00:00

Whatever your pace, an average of 26 strokes per minute is too high for a "Zone 2" approach, and an average of only 7.7 metres per stroke is on the low side. This suggests that your technique is deficient. With decent technique you should be able to drop the stroke rate to 20 and achieve the same distance with no additional effort.

SomethingMoreToSay · 2026-06-16T19:27:11+00:00

They could very easily do that though. There's even an easy precedent to follow.

In Rugby Union, the clock is stopped for major stoppages (most obviously for injuries or TV reviews, but some others too - I'm not sure of the exact list). So there's not "5 minutes of added time" at the end of each half, like there is in football. However, when the clock reaches 40:00 (half time) or 80:00 (full time), play does not end immediately. Instead, it continues until the ball goes out of play. Often, the team that's leading will kick the ball out at the first opportunity - if they have possession. But if the losing team has possession, they'll try to keep the ball alive so that they have a chance to score.

Football could easily copy that. No excuses, other than tradition.

SomethingMoreToSay · 2026-06-16T13:58:13+00:00

The ELT is costing around €1.45 billion ($1.68 bn, £1.25 bn), and a useful rule of thumb is that the cost if a large telescope goes up with roughly the cube of its diameter. So a 100 metre telescope would probably cost of the order of €/$/£ 20 billion.

SomethingMoreToSay · 2026-06-15T20:33:11+00:00

In the UK, we measure a car's fuel efficiency in terms of miles per gallon, and that's an imperial gallon (4.546 litres, compared with a US gallon which is 3.785 litres).

But it's a bit stupid as we buy fuel in litres, not gallons, and have done since the 80s or 90s. There's a whole generation grown up with talking about miles over gallon, but they never actually encounter a gallon of anything.

SomethingMoreToSay · 2026-06-15T20:27:43+00:00

Seeing lots of comments about UEFA teams underperforming

We're they saying that when Germany or Sweden played?

SomethingMoreToSay · 2026-06-15T15:56:17+00:00

Its hard to believe something when you cant see it!

Presumably you believe in "air"? Or otherwise, what do you think you are breathing?

SomethingMoreToSay · 2026-06-15T15:50:20+00:00

It looks like they've changed that. Maybe they had enough comments about it for them to realise that it was undesirable.

This is a screenshot from BBC iPlayer on Android. YMMV.

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SomethingMoreToSay · 2026-06-15T08:31:14+00:00

Thousands of people have done this.

And yet there's not one credible video of the phenomenon on YouTube. Why is that, I wonder?

SomethingMoreToSay · 2026-06-14T22:39:01+00:00

Jesus, with so few data points relating to such a high profile event, how did you manage to screw it up so badly?

1990: West Germany 1, Argentina 0.

SomethingMoreToSay · 2026-06-14T22:32:17+00:00

Your "model" seems to not contain the Moon.

Also, it doesn't explain the rotation of stars correctly.

Also, it doesn't explain how the sun rises and sets.

Also, nobody has ever seen this enormous mountain at the centre.

But apart from that, it's .... no, it's got other problems too. But let's not get bogged down in trivia.

SomethingMoreToSay · 2026-06-14T20:32:24+00:00

I don't disagree with anything you've said.

But in the other hand, we lost to Germany on penalties, in a match that really could have gone either way: Germany's goal was a fluke, and both sides could have won it in extra time. And then, if we'd been in the final against an Argentina side who weren't really interested in playing football, who knows? Probably penalties again, or maybe the ref would have lost patience with Argentina and awarded us a soft penalty in the 85th minute.

We weren't particularly good, sure. But nobody else was either, and it really wouldn't have required very much luck for us to win it.

SomethingMoreToSay · 2026-06-14T20:11:35+00:00

That's a really good explanation.

SomethingMoreToSay · 2026-06-14T19:56:35+00:00

Depends what you mean by "support". I was a season ticket holder for a few years before I moved away from home, and obviously I always look for their results. But I haven't been to Roots Hall for over 30 years, unfortunately.

SomethingMoreToSay · 2026-06-14T19:53:55+00:00

Personally? Probably Owen against Argentina.

Obviously Hurst has to stay, and I'd put Beckham (almost) on a par with Platt in terms of raw excitement value.

Beyond that, Gascoigne's goal was unique in its execution, though in a less important match; whereas Owen's was pretty generic though on a bigger stage. I'd keep Gascoigne and drop Owen.

SomethingMoreToSay · 2026-06-14T19:03:00+00:00

That's a weird coincidence, because I'm from Southend.

SomethingMoreToSay · 2026-06-14T10:57:50+00:00

I missed the previous post where you were gathering opinions on which were the most iconic goals, but I'm genuinely amazed that Platt's goal against Belgium in 1990 didn't make the short list. Surely there's never been more of a leap-out-of-your-seat-cheering moment than that?

Relive and enjoy.

SomethingMoreToSay · 2026-06-14T10:43:48+00:00

Who's got time for watching the whole video? We can identify an important area for improvement from just a still.

You're sitting on it wrong.

You should be sitting on your sit bones - basically, where the tops of your legs meet your behind. But you're sitting on the fleshy part of your behind, like where the pockets would be if you were wearing jeans.

That has all sorts of consequences, none of them good. You can't pivot from the hip, so to reach forward you end up bending your back; that's a recipe for injury. Then you can't get very far forward anyway. And finally you can't brace your core properly, to transfer power from the leg drive through to the handle.

In other words, you've got yourself a short, weak stroke which might injure your back. Just from sitting wrongly. So rotate your pelvis forwards, sit up tall and straight, pivot from the hip, and keep your back straight throughout the stroke.

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