Hello, and welcome to the Double Pivot, the world's most agreeable podcast with Michael Kaley and Mike Goodman. Uh, yeah, I'm Michael Kaley. Uh, there's going to be a little bit of soccer this week? There shouldn't be.
There was a little bit of soccer last week? There shouldn't have been. We're going to keep doing a podcast about something. I'm going to feel really weird talking about Premier League games and, like, championship games that really shouldn't be happening.
I don't know what we're going to do, but we have plans. We are going to pause through it. If there is one thing that we know, this is a moment when people are going to be completely separate from one another. The only way they will be able to interact is over the internet.
This is the moment for posters. People like me and Mike, who have been decades in the posting trenches, writing thoughts and putting them online for no reason. We are now here. We are prepared for this moment to write our thoughts, to speak our thoughts, put them online for no good reason, because that's the only way humans can communicate in the middle of the pandemic.
I'm joined by Mike Goodman. He is ready to talk about stuff. Yeah. I mean, I feel like today we'll talk a little bit about Liverpool and just about the end of soccer.
And then the longer this goes, the more divorced from soccer we are going to get by necessity. And by the, you know, the various workings of our own very two online brains being confined mostly to our houses. It's the music you heard on the way in. Still the whileers.
Max is not with us on the other side of the virtual class today. I guess I'll start by like talking about what our pandemic podcasting plan is. The good old triple P. Yes.
It just sort of generally felt like it would be weird to keep doing a full hour or two full hours every week on like whatever. And what we're going to do is like a bunch of like smaller topical podcasts. Right. What these topics are, who knows?
But the idea will be 20 minutes, somewhat more focused on a specific topic, leading towards what we do on the moose at a belly level. Oh my God. Like a specific player or whatever. Like some of these will be soccer related topics.
I imagine some of them will not be. Feel free to let us know what you'd like us to talk about because we got time to fill. We got time. I mean, we will put these, we will sort of distribute these on the free side and the subscription side.
We want to make sure that people that are paying us get something of value for their money, even while being forced to be at home doing nothing. Yeah. And so we really do, I mean, you know, among all other things, we are also like deeply money for a podcast and we really do appreciate you sticking with us during weird, weird, weird times. That is correct.
All right. Liverpool are out of the Champions League that is about to no longer exist. Yep. Yep.
That might have been the last check of the Champions League. So I don't know. No one's good with the Champions League. Liverpool won't be anybody else either.
The first Liverpool match, you talked about this, in Madrid, was a truly great defensive performance by Elastico Madrid. They had almost no possession. And despite that, they controlled the shape of the match. Liverpool were unable to get into the penalty area, unable to get good shots.
They actually kind of penalty area a weird amount. This is something that Atleti do when they're playing well. The other team does get into the penalty area a weird amount and still doesn't do anything for them. It was not.
I mean, it is a wild sort of statistical profile where Liverpool got into the box a decent amount against Atleti. But it's not like they took contested shots in the box. They were not able to get shots off at all in the box. Their average shooting distance was the second longest in the round behind only Atleti.
So they could either take pot shots or distance or move the ball into the box and not get shots in that match. Right. Because every time they moved the ball into the box, there were multiple defenders in position to prevent any kind of dangerous movement. And this is what was just completely different this time around.
This time, Liverpool were consistently able to get these four-on-five, five-on-seven kind of breaks where they were finding space. For me, no multiple times found space. There's a header for Robertson. Again and again, they were getting shots off from dangerous positions.
And that was what was very different this time around. What wasn't different was the result, which is that Liverpool took a very, very long time to score a goal and then Atleti scored three. Yeah, right. I don't know.
Like, it's football. There was an error by Adrian, but, like, I don't think that they got a couple shots off and scored freedom. I'm like, football happens. Football has not happened to Liverpool this season, as we have talked about, but football happens.
And that's what happens here. And then it did start happening to them last month, so the world ended the season. I mean, like, on some level, people are out here being like, oh, God, the world is ending right before Liverpool can win their title. The other way to look at this is, like, Liverpool ran ridiculously hot for months.
And then as soon as the soccer gods started to, like, visit their comeuppance, the world was like, no, no, no, no, no. Like, this is very, like, the battle of the Greek gods in Troy, right? Being played out through Liverpool. Yeah, no, the gods are finishing the gods, yeah.
Anyway, so, there's still going to be soccer at this point in England? Yeah, for now. Like, the whole thing here is there's got to be soccer, but, like, the UK government is, like, it seems like the UK government has been, like, pushing the soccer leagues to stay open because that's their plan. I don't know.
It's not good. It's not smart. Neither of us are epidemiologists. We both know some epidemiologists, and we both, like, I mean, there's, like, a lot of worldwide agreement that keeping stadiums open is a terrible idea and everything should be canceled and shut down.
And yet. Yeah. So the basic concept, which I have been taught by people in my life, the idea of R-naught, the idea of how many people does a person with the disease infect? And the thing is that diseases have, sort of, generally are given an R-naught.
I think the flu is, like, 1.7. People have estimated the coronavirus at around 2.something-something. But, like, it's not a hard number. The number of people that a person infects is a function of a bunch of things.
There can be medication that causes you to shed, and the shedding of the virus, so you're not as contagious for as long. That lowers your R-naught. That is also what the point of all of these procedures of social distancing are. Every single thing lowers the R-naught.
Every person you don't talk to, every person you don't shake hands with, that makes them less likely to get the disease from you. That's the sort of basic concept here. I'm sorry, but every time you say R-naught, and I understand this is very serious, and my brain is very broken, I cannot help but think of Rushmore and Jason Schwartzman in his scrubs going, Oh, are they? I can't.
Yeah, so it just goes against everything that everyone else is doing, and it's going to be really, really weird to watch the games this weekend if they do go on. Yeah, I don't sort of know what reaction I'm going to have in live time, but it's pretty clear that they shouldn't be doing this, I think. Or it is at least quite clear that commonly understood best practices is to not do this. And one thing I think is interesting is to what degree this becomes a problem at the player level.
Yeah, please. There's no, absolutely players are going to get sick. Like, there's just, you know, we're recording this on a day on Thursday when finally sort of the world took a cascading set of actions that may in fact be a little too late, but are nonetheless good actions to take in terms of canceling things, canceling events, closing schools. Really, there has been a marked increase in the urgency of the response today.
To some degree, this was kicked off by the NBA suspending their season when one of their players tested positive, which is a whole stupid story in and of itself. But this is going to happen in the premier. A lesser city has to be players in self-quarantine right now. So, like, what is going to be sort of the deciding driving factor of a premier league that continues to exist is going to become, in short order, who is healthy enough to get on the field, not who's playing better when they're there.
And who is, like, safe to be on the field. The other thing that happened recently in the U.S., the big NCAA basketball tournament, the big college basketball tournament, looks likely to be shut down. I mean, it has been totally shut down. And colleges are pulling out.
And one thing that happened before that is there was a college coach sitting on the sideline looking visibly sick while he was coaching. Turns out he just had the flu. He went to the hospital and got this and just had the flu. You're sitting there watching images of this.
Like, you can't be doing this. You can't have, you can't at this point be sick in public with symptoms that are indistinguishable from the coronavirus. Because it's a public health problem. If you are sick, you need to stay home.
If you are sick and you need to go out, you do need to wear a mask. Right. And, like, these are actions that you take for other people. If you don't need to do is wear a mask if you are healthy, that will not actually protect you.
And you could leave mask availability for people who are sick and must leave the house. But, yes, the point here is quite clearly that, like, if you're young and healthy, you're doing this because of everybody else. Because there are people that are young and not healthy that won't survive if they catch this. There are lots of people who are old who won't survive if they catch this.
Even more to the point, many people who will survive won't if lots of people get this because of the way it taxes the medical system. This is the moment of – this is what the emergency is about. The virus itself is quite bad. But, you know, quite bad for a virus like this is manageable on a global scale.
But it's not manageable if it overwhelms the medical system, which is what is happening in northern Italy and increasingly all of Italy, what happened in Wuhan, China. Where we have seen the worst of this, that is why. And there is meaningful evidence that in those situations the death rate from the coronavirus increases and the death rate from other things increases. Right.
It just leads to people dying because what doctors have to do, instead of triaging people based on whether it is necessary – whether – like, the normal decision doctors make when they treat people is, like, is it going to be better or worse for this person to stay in a hospital for a night? It's not good for you to stay in a hospital for a night. If you're very sick, you have to do it. And, like, that's the judgment.
They know how to make that judgment. Then suddenly you're making the judgment of, like, is this person more sick than the next person who might need the bed? And, like, that's where things get really, really messy. Right.
And that's – I mean, the scary thing is that that's where we're headed. And that that's what sort of everybody should be prepared for. And, like, obviously you hope that it becomes a Y2K situation and that the real mobilization in the last day and going forward makes a difference in that trajectory. But the thing to prepare for is that it will not.
The hope is that after the fact, eventually, we will be able to say – we will be able to argue years from now that, no, we didn't overreact. We reacted properly, and that's why it did not get as bad as it could have, but the more likely reality is that it's going to get bad. Which is sort of why we're sitting here doing a soccer podcast being like, boy, I don't – like, breaking down Liverpool in that – you know, given everything else that's going on, is – it's challenging to get excited over. And, like, we understand that people oftentimes will turn to sports for distraction and will turn to sports, like, specifically in order to not think about the stuff that's going on.
The problem is, in this case, as with so many cases with sports, is that the actual conducting of sports, the actual holding of events and continuing to do this is interwoven with the story itself. You don't – you know, oftentimes it's like a social – like, like, a social justice perspective argument as to whether or not you should – stick to sports as to whether or not it's important to highlight the ways in which sports interact with whatever the story is you're trying to avoid by watching sports. In this case, it is a public health issue, and the conducting of sporting events themselves is, in fact, interwoven with the public health. And it is – like, the reason you don't do it is because people will get sick.
And so it's unavoidable to talk about it sort of in that context, even as you might want sports as a distraction. I suppose the one thing we could do is get really into eSports. Yeah, I know. That's just not going to happen.
I don't know how bad things have got to get for me to start paying attention to eSports, but – I'm pretty sure it wasn't this. I'm pretty sure if I didn't have kids, that would be the route I was going down. But, like, ha-ha, the idea of me being able to pay attention to, like, an eSports for an hour with a 3-year-old and an 8-month-old running around my apartment and my wife and I both in theory working from home. Like, you know, lots of people are going to come out the other side of this and be like, I was bored for a month staying at home and watching Netflix.
Like, parents of young kids, I'm going to lose my mind. It's going to be bad. So, yeah, so what we're going to do is we're going to do podcasts on topics. Most of them are not going to be the coronavirus.
God willing. Like, we're not going to be the coronavirus out there. I mean, God willing. But, like, I mean, I think that, like, there will be – as decisions continue to get made, we'll talk about it.
But I think that, like, what we want to be doing is talking about stuff that we want – I think that I want this to be sort of, like, not just, like, pure escapism. Obviously, we'll talk about stuff that matters. But, like, you know, we're always stuck inside. I'd like to talk about, like, an interesting player on Fiorentina in 2014, 2015.
I'd like to talk about, like, ways of measuring things in soccer analytics. I'd like to talk about the Bible. I'd like to talk about all of the weird random stuff that we get into. And so we would love your feedback.
I put up an open thread. We've got some suggestions there about what you'd like to hear about. And we'll talk about it. That is the plan for the foreseeable future until sort of we understand what the world is going to look like in a few months.
I do think there's, like, a couple different ways this could go. It's possible we'll just be done – like, the world will just be done with soccer until next season, August, September. I suppose in a few cases it's possible we won't be ready to come back then. And at the start of the next season or the finish of the season, depending on how the leagues want to do things, we'll be delayed even further.
There's also a world where a quick and large, you know, aggressive intervention by the world here does have positive effects beyond what we might anticipate. And that come June, sort of the world is safe to hold events of some sort, maybe even just for closed stadiums. And that leagues pick back up and sort of finish suspended leagues. And we'll be back to covering that.
I think that it looks likely that Euro 2020 is going to get pushed to 2021. So if we come back this summer, then there'll probably be, like, domestic matches getting made up or something. But we'll see. What they should do, they should just open the transfer window tomorrow and have the transfer window be open for eight months.
That would, one, be amazing, and two, absolutely lead to agents flying all over the place and getting people sick. Yeah. The one downside of my amazing idea is to hit soccer podcasting. Oh, boy.
Also, if you have crazy, interesting, like, offbeat ideas to pitch to the stats bomb, now is the time to get at me. I am running a soccer website, at least for a while. I've got some ideas. We'll see what happens.
Stuff is weird. Wash your hands. If you get sick, stay home. That's right.
Wash your hands and stay home. Maybe even get home. All right. We'll be out with others.
All right. Cheers. All right. Cheers.