Women's World Cup 2023 - Group Stage Network Diagrams

Slightly late, but really, who starts a World Cup on a Thursday!!! 

Making these charts revealed some interesting things: 

1 - All teams have at least 1 player playing in their home league except Canada. I'm not sure if that's because the US league is both so strong and right next door. 

2 - All teams have at least one player playing abroad. 

3 - Adding more teams has made the diagram much messier. 

4 - A remarkable number of Zambia's players (4/23) play in the Kazakh league. Also, I found out there was a Kazakh league. This shouldn't have surprised me. 

5 - There are Saudi Arabian women's teams. That really did surprise me. 

What does the diagram look like?  

The club teams with the most representatives are Barcelona, with 17, Chelsea, with 16 and Paris Saint-Germain with 14. 

Looking at the community view, there are 32 teams but 24 communities. The communities are as follows: 

1 - Vietnam 

2 - Zambia 

3 - Philippines 

4 - Argentina and Brazil 

5 - Panama and Costa Rica 

6 - China 

7 - Colombia 

8 - Portugal and Nigeria 

9 - New Zealand 

10 - South Africa 

11 - Haiti 

12 - Jamaica and Canada 

13 - United States 

14 - South Korea 

15 - Spain 

16 - Ireland 

17 - Morocco 

18 - Switzerland 

19 - France and Netherlands 

20 - Australia, Sweden and England 

21 - Japan 

22 - Denmark and Norway 

23 - Italy 

24 - Germany 

It's actually really hard to tell where the centre of the diagram. Obviously, there's the physical centre, which would be Brazil or New Zealand in terms of national teams and Pachuca for the club teams, but the weight of the teams is concentrated in the bottom, where Sweden, Norway and Denmark make a really heavy cluster. That also makes it hard to make predictions (as L requires). 

The following are my predictions from this diagram, with the caveat that it was really hard to distinguish the centre of the diagram. 

Group A - Philippines and New Zealand out, but closer than expected (I said this before the NZ vs Norway game and have witnesses to me saying it. Multiple witnesses. I should also apologise to Norway for drawing them in my work sweepstakes.) 

Group B - Nigeria and Ireland out 

Group C - Zambia and Costa Rica out 

Group D - China and Haiti out 

Group E - Portual and Vietnam out 

 Group F - Brazil and Panama out, but that sounds weird to my ears 

Group G - South Africa and Argentina are out, but see previous statement 

Group H - Morocco and Colombia out

Formula 1 - British Grand Prix 2023

The good: Ignoring first place, there was racing all the way up and down the grid.

The bad: That Ferrari.  Last year we had a car that went, and a strategy team that didn't.  This year, the strategy team have reached the dizzying heights of not-actively-harming-the-team, but the car has no go.  Given the other two Ferrari teams make up two of the bottom three I suspect it's the engine.

The embarrassing:  Channel 4's coverage in general (seriously, it look me 5 minutes which included an ad break before I had to hit the mute button).

The coverage pretending that Norris getting ahead and staying ahead for a lap and a half was a sign of someone challenging Red Bull's domination, rather than it taking that long for Verstappen to figure out which was was forward following the jostling at the start, and then the Red Bull overtaking the McLaren in a lap.

The racing was closer while there was no DRS activated, and I think it highlights that the go-faster button's time is through.  DRS was invented to create more overtaking opportunities, now all it does is mean that no one else has a chance of keep the stronger cars behind them, no matter how good the individual driver is.

2023 Tour de France Withdrawals - Week 2

Every edition of the Tour has that one stage where there's a sudden disaster and lots of people drop out. I've seen it be hard mountain stages, where too many people are over the time limit, but not enough for the broom wagon to be cancelled, I've seen it be hard stages where there's been a bug going through the peloton, I've seen it been rain and crash. 

This year's "that one dratted stage" seems to have been stage 14, where a combo of slippy road, a turn and ill-fortune took down a swath of riders (https://www.eurosport.co.uk/cycling/tour-de-france/2023/tour-de-france-neutralised-after-extraordinarily-nasty-moment-on-stage-14-involving-almost-all-teams_vid1951457/video.shtml) 

[I'm not sure who that Intermarche-Circus-Wanty rider is, probably Adrien Petit, but that's possibly the actual face of "damn it all" made flesh.] 

Stage 14 really stands out in the pie chart of withdrawals by stage.  And you can see the inflection it causes in the Kaplan Meier diagram  The Kaplan-Meier split out by teams makes it clear that life continues to happen to Astana and EF Education-Easy Post  

All of last week's withdrawals were either did not start the day following previous crashes (or general wear and tear) or mid-stage abandons due to aforementioned crashes. Interestingly, that means there still hasn't been an over-the-time limit withdrawal. 

In the yellow jersey standings at the start of the third week there was so little in it that people started to talk about 1989. I know people enjoy talking about that edition. 

I've mostly just been enjoying Kwiatkowski and Izagirre winning stages, and desperately trying not to jinx a certain rider who is still in. (If I avoid jinxing him, I will explain who it is) 

The final post in this series will be delayed by a week for reasons, but I hope to add an extra special diagram to make up for the delay.

2023 Tour de France Withdrawals - Week 1

The withdrawals so far in the 2023 Tour de France have come in three groups: 

1 - The crash that lead to Mas and Carapaz's withdrawals - https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/cycling/66076741 

2 - The crash that wiped out Guarnieri and Luis Leon Sanchez - https://www.cyclingnews.com/news/tour-de-france-crashes-blight-motor-circuit-finale-to-stage-4/ 

3 - Stage 8's two crashes that lead to Cavendish's broken collarbone and Cras's withdrawal - https://www.cyclingnews.com/news/cras-blames-spectator-for-tour-de-france-crash-which-saw-simon-yates-mikel-landa-lose-time/ 

Quinn Simmons is the first "general wear and tear" withdrawal this year (https://www.cyclingnews.com/news/quinn-simmons-abandons-the-tour-de-france-ahead-of-stage-9/). I expect them to start mounting.

Looking at withdrawals by stage:      

All the withdrawals have been mid-stage abandonments or did not start the next day due to previous crashes, there have been no riders who have missed time limit cut-offs. This is despite the first week containing an unexpectedly large amount of climbing and difficult stages compared to usual (https://twitter.com/eltiodeldato/status/1674387305618894848 and https://twitter.com/eltiodeldato/status/1674713858722676736 demonstrate this well). 

Because there's relatively few withdrawals, the Kaplan Meier chart is pretty flat, although the Kaplan Meier split by teams makes it quite clear that the Tour has happened to Astana.  

Talking about Astana, one thing this week has highlighted is the paucity of cycling knowledge in the people writing about road cycling in the big media sources. 

The UK press coverage, in non-specialist outlets, entirely understandably, was all about Mark Cavendish. 

Cue, when Leon Sanchez had to withdraw, many inches of print about how this was terrible for Cav's sprint train. 

... 

... 

Yeah, that Luis Leon Sanchez. 

As a vital component of a sprint train. 

... 

Dear general sports journalists who cover cycling once a year, either stick to the facts or if you want to add opinion, throw some money at the excellent cycling journalists available and get them to write you something. Because really, sometimes, what you write, makes you sound like morons. 

Now, I know a sensible team, if they had a sprinter who could break one of "the records" but needed a sprint train, would put together a sprint train, and dedicate the team to that. But it's Astana, and who *ever* accused Astana of being sensible*. Of course they've frankensteined a team together to try to go for sprint victories and have a GC contender, plus Lutsenko for climbing stage wins. 

I can't help but feel I am a jinx on Cavendish because news of the crash happened just as I opened my phone to check how the Tour was doing on Saturday. 

L is putting it down to a Belgian conspiracy, but he's had more than one twelve-hour shift this week, so we will forgive him melodramatic conspiracy theories. 

I love that Vinokourov has immediately gone with "if Cavendish wants to stay, we will have him" (https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/cycling/66147017). Because he knows how that feels and because he has style**. 

All this, and I've not said anything about Pogacar vs Vingegaard, which is bubbling along nicely. 

In the grand tradition of "you can't win a Grand Tour in the first week, but you can lose it", neither of them have lost it, and it could get very interesting in the next two weeks. 

* Said with love, affection and exasperation. Astana have been my team since they were created, because wither Vinokourov goes, so do I. 

** He lies, cheats and connives, but he does it with style.

Formula 1 - Austrian Grand Prix 2023

Given orange is not one of Austria's national colours, there was a remarkable amount of it about at the Red Bull Ring. 

To an extent, as a Ferrari fan, I can't be too disappointed, there were two Ferrari podiums. 

On the other hand, sprint races are still a waste of time, and there is no way of stopping Red Bull. 

The thing that makes me happiest about the Grand Prix is that it looks like I might be able to upgrade the Ferrari strategy team's probationary cookie of competence to a full cookie. 

The stacked pit stops didn't quite work as well as they could have done (it's Ferrari, it would be dull if everything went as well as it could), but they show thinking and decisiveness and other things previously missing. 

The major talking point from the weekend (other than Hamilton and Verstappen's little spat about having a single dominant F1 team being boring) was track limits. I have some sympathy for both sides of the argument. Yes, having stewards pouring over footage of the track, flagging it but the message only coming through laps later is good for no one. I did like the suggestion that the message should be sent electronically and flag on the driver's steering wheel, but I'm not sure where on the display it can go and be noticed (have a really interesting article on F1 steering wheels - https://www.mercedesamgf1.com/news/how-does-an-f1-steering-wheel-work). 

On the other hand, F1 drivers, if you're the best in the world, keep it on the race track! It can't be that difficult, both Leclerc and Verstappen managed it. Now that most race tracks don't have walls or gravel next to the track, but have run-off areas instead, people don't respect the edges of the track. The previous solution of "sausage" kerbs were too dangerous (Red Bull is supposed to give you wings, but the cars are not supposed to fly), so this is the solution we've got. 

If F1 is going to keep it though, it needs to be enforced at all the tracks and enforced in a more timely fashion.