Simple football

I've been waiting for an opportunity to write about the world championship football wich is taking place in Germany now. First, this is the first WC to be blogged about in this amount. If you want to catch everything there is to know about the WC from a user perspective, (pun intended) check out the SoccerBlog archive. It is a syndication of a lot of soccer blogs, some of which are pretty good. There are even some live blogs from bloggers, blogging about the match as it is played. You'd think there wouldn't be a market, but it seems there is...

One particular post I liked is from Worldview World Cup which talks about the Dutch shirt Design and the changed strategy of the Dutch team.

The Dutch like to play offensive football, they like to be on the opponents half and in possession of the ball upward of 70% of the time. Most teams react to this strategy by calling every man into the penalty area and locking the goal solid.

The Dutch defeated Ivory Coast ... to advance to the round of 16, owing in part to the new Era of Pragmatism in Dutch soccer ushered in by Marco van Basten. The argument for it goes like this: The modern game, with its powerful defenders, does not allow you to practice flashy attacking style all the time. If we'll give up some of the initiative in the match, we will be able to do our gorgeous, uniquely Dutch thing at least some of the time. This strategy is also meant to protect the Dutch from these dull defensive underdog teams that have been so successful of late (Sweden and Mexico are the latest victims, with Portugal well on their way as I am writing this).

Apparently the Dutch Coach is working on a book "The Pragmatic Footballer" and talked to Pragmatic Dave for a bit.

To me, Pragmatism, Getting Real or Simple are all in the same league. Use common sense in design and development, measure results as well as shifting goals, examine and fine tune effectiveness of techniques, review and adapt accordingly.

By getting rid of the Dutch dogma of needing to play beautiful football all of the time, the Dutch create more chances to practice their style when it counts. For now, the Dutch results are accordingly. An example is the record streak by Dutch goalie Edwin van der Sar (see picture) that was ended by the Ivory Coast goal last Friday. Van der Sar managed to keep the nil for up to ten WC games and over a thousand minutes of play, a European record. His unpassable streak has lasted since the match against Finland in October 2004.

So simple works, also in football as well as in development;

Skip the chrome, but make your app shine where it counts.

Under the leadership of Marco van Basten the Dutch team has only lost one match yet, a practice match, against Italy. Coaches are very important to football, well almost any sport. Why are there so few coaches in software and web development?

I think any team needs a good coach. What do you think?

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