The Agony and the Agony... in world cup 2014 Brazil

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The World Cup Flopping Rankings

Brazil, Neymar Are Most Commonly Seen in Anguish; Bosnia Is Most Likely to 'Grin and Bare It'

One of the most common complaints during this otherwise splendid World Cup is the amount of time players spend embellishing injuries.

All too often during matches, seemingly fit men fall to the ground in agony. They scream, wince, pound the grass with their fists and gesture to the sidelines for a stretcher. Some of them clutch a limb as if it was just freed from the jaws of a wood chipper.

But after a few moments, just as the priests arrive to administer last rites, they sit up on the gurney, shake it off, rise to their feet and run back on the field to play some more.

Fans of the world's most popular game know that this is just one of soccer's oldest and most universally despised tactics. Turning a small foul into a death performance worthy of La Scala can draw cards for opposing players, kill time from the clock or just give one's winded teammates a breather. What's interesting about the World Cup is that not all national teams are the same. Some embellish all the time, some hardly at all. 

With this in mind, the Count loaded 32 World Cup matches on the DVR and set out to perform a comprehensive empirical study aimed at determining one thing: Which World Cup participant nation is the world's floppiest?

During the first 32 games, there were 302 players who could be seen at some point rolling around in pain, crumpling into a fetal position or lying lifeless on the pitch as the referee stopped the match. These theatrical episodes ate up a total of 132 minutes of clock, a metric we have decided to call "writhing time."

To be fair, it is actually possible to get hurt playing soccer. You can clang heads. You can snap a hamstring. You can get spiked in the soft tissue. There were nine injuries in total that forced players to be substituted from the game and to miss, or potentially miss, a match. These were discarded. That left 293 cases of potential embellishment that collectively took up 118 minutes, 21 seconds.

Another trick: how to calculate writhing time. The criteria used here is the moment the whistle is blown (because of a potential injury) to the moment that player stands up. If the TV camera cut to a replay, the stand-up moment was estimated. If he was helped off the field, the "writhing" clock stopped when he crossed the sidelines.

The study showed one thing emphatically: The amount of histrionics your players display during a match correlates strongly to what the scoreboard says. Players on teams that were losing their games accounted for 40 "injuries" and nearly 12.5 minutes of writhing time. But players on teams that were winning—the ones who have the most incentive to run out the clock—accounted for 103 "injuries" and almost four times as much writhing.

So with that cleared away, here are the "winners" of our first-ever international soccer injury-embellishment awards. Envelopes, please!

The Team Most Commonly Seen in Anguish: Brazil. There were 17 incidents in two games when a member of the Seleção was seen on the ground in pain—the most of any country. World Cup poster boy Neymar had five such "injuries," the most on his team. In every case he was back on his feet within 15 seconds.

The Overall Writhing-Time Champions: Honduras. Los Catrachos spent the most time on the ground or being tended to by trainers: seven minutes and 40 seconds to be exact. Naturally, five minutes and 10 seconds of that came in the first half against France when the match was tied (which would have been good enough for them).

The Team Most Likely to Grin and Bear it: Bosnia and Herzegovina. These World Cup newbies obviously don't get how this works. They only had two "injuries" in two games for a total of 24 seconds of writhing time.

The Team With the Most Carnage in One Game: Chile. While they protected an early lead against Spain, the Chileans tallied 11 "injuries," more than 24 other teams had in two games.

The Fastest "Injury" Yet: Enner Valencia, Ecuador. Against Honduras, Valencia was on the ground, clutching his leg after four seconds.

Worst Use of a Stretcher: 5 players (tie) Of the nine players carried off in these matches, five returned—all in less than 90 seconds, including American DaMarcus Beasley.

El Niño Said to Have 60% Chance of Occurring

U.N. Agency Says Likelihood Is 'More Than Double the Historical Probability'

By 

GAUTAM NAIK 

CONNECT

June 26, 2014 11:45 a.m. ET

The World Meteorological Organization says there is a 60% chance that the disruptive weather phenomenon known as El Niño will become fully established between now and August.

In its previous update, issued in April, the agency noted that there were signs that El Niño could occur, but it didn't put a specific number on the likelihood of it happening. It is now more certain that El Niño will develop, based on data collected by climate agencies in the U.S., U.K., France, Japan and elsewhere.

"If you go by historical frequency, there's a 25% chance of El Niño to occur at any time," said Rupa Kumar Kolli, climate scientist at the WMO, a Geneva-based agency of the United Nations. "Now we have 60%—which is more than double the historical probability."

El Niño is a natural cyclical event that gets triggered when winds in the equatorial Pacific slow down or reverse direction. That warms the water and can disrupt weather patterns around the world.

The impact can be severe. El Niño is associated with local droughts and floods. The Indian monsoon rainfall tends to be less than normal, which affects crops. Storms also tend to be more vigorous in the Gulf of Mexico and along the southeast coast of the U.S., which leads to wetter-than-normal conditions in that area.

Altered weather patterns have big effects, especially on activities such as agriculture and mining. Thus, in the past, El Niño has triggered price increases for a range of commodities, including soybeans, coffee and nickel. The last El Niño was in 2009-2010.

In recent years, researchers have become increasingly concerned that El Niño may amplify the effects of long-term global warming.

The main reason is that in El Niño years, the global mean temperature tends to be slightly higher than normal, a conclusion that is based on data collected over more than a half-century. Some researchers worry that when the El Niño effect on temperature is added to the longer-term pattern of increased temperature, the weather in El Niño years could get more disrupted than usual.

Government-run climate agencies in the U.S. and Japan have independently reported that average global temperatures in the month of May were the highest on record, even without an El Niño.

"If you couple high temperatures with a full-blown El Niño, things could get worse," said Dr. Kolli.

So far, the models suggest that this year's potential El Niño will be of moderate strength. The data shows that while the sea-surface and subsurface temperatures have reached the threshold states in parts of the Pacific, the overlying atmosphere in those regions haven't reached the conditions that would trigger El Niño.

In typical El Niño years, surface sea temperatures in the central and eastern Pacific are substantially warmer than temperatures in the western Pacific. This year, though, the western Pacific is warmer than usual—one possible reason why El Niño has yet to form.

But, as with many things climate-related, predictions can only go so far. In 2012, for example, U.S. researchers issued an "El Niño Watch" when chances became as high as 75% that El Niño would form. It never did.

http://online.wsj.com/articles/el-nino-said-to-have-60-chance-of-occurring-through-august-1403797546