Sunday has Liverpool traveling to London to face Crystal Palace and Spurs going on the road to play Hull. Also Sunday afternoon are the first legs of the MLS semi-finals. The Red Bulls will host the New England Revolution at 1:30 on NBC. The Seattle Sounders travel to LA to face the Galaxy at 5 pm on ESPN. The second leg of both those series are next weekend.
And in case you don't get enough on the weekend, Aston Villa (probably without Ron Vlaar) get a visit from red hot Southampton on Monday at 3 pm.
International Break - Notable results from the Euro qualifiers
Scotland beat Ireland 1-0 - "low on quality, high on endeavor and adrenalin" per the Guardian - at "breathless" Celtic Park in Glasgow. England didn't have much trouble dealing with Slovenia in a 3-1 win that featured a solid performance from returning Danny Welbeck. Belgium could manage only a draw at home versus Wales. Belgium find themselves sitting in 4th in Group B (wait, look who's atop the group - Israel!) and will need to stop mailing in the performances; I don't mean to take anything away from the spirited effort from Wales but this was a match that Belgium should win.
If the atmosphere was electric for the Scotland-Ireland contest, it was literally incendiary for Italy-Croatia in Milan. No, I mean it. The match was stopped after a number of flares were thrown on the pitch. Not to mention a whole section seemed to be on fire from flares as well.
Rockets red glare indeed. Decent match. Ironically, the delay caused by the pyrotechnics, which appeared to be emanating from a Croatian section, came at a time when Croatia looked to be taking over the match. They weren't quite the same afterwards. And I shouldn't make light of the incident. As this article points out, there are serious and ugly issues with Croatian football right now.
Random Statistics
The folks at soccerSTATS.com have compiled a treasure trove of data about the game. For example, for the last three years, there have been consistently more goals scored in the second half - between 56-58% of all goals compared to 42-44% in the first half. Though the second half is typically longer - because there is usually more stoppage time than in the first half - I don't think that would explain all the difference (I agree that seems an unlikely explanation, but if we assume the first half has an average of 1 minute of stoppage time, then 3 minutes added to second half is 4% longer and 4 minutes is 7% longer.). A second fun thing they did was what the table would look like at half time. Combining that with the actual table, we can see who has improved their position the most in the second half, or conversely, who wished the matches ended at 45 minutes. By the way, the change doesn't net to zero because a typical situation is a halftime draw becoming "unequalized," which results in a +2 for the team taking the lead but only a -1 for the team falling behind.
| Total | Points | ||
| Points | at half | Change | |
| Southampton | 25 | 17 | 8 |
| Newcastle | 16 | 9 | 7 |
| Chelsea | 29 | 23 | 6 |
| Arsenal | 17 | 12 | 5 |
| Man City | 21 | 18 | 3 |
| West Brom | 13 | 10 | 3 |
| West Ham | 18 | 16 | 2 |
| Stoke | 15 | 14 | 1 |
| Tottenham | 14 | 13 | 1 |
| Burnley | 7 | 6 | 1 |
| Liverpool | 14 | 14 | 0 |
| Sunderland | 12 | 12 | 0 |
| Swansea | 18 | 19 | -1 |
| Man Utd | 16 | 17 | -1 |
| Crystal Palace | 9 | 10 | -1 |
| Leicester | 9 | 10 | -1 |
| Hull | 11 | 13 | -2 |
| Aston Villa | 11 | 13 | -2 |
| QPR | 8 | 11 | -3 |
| Everton | 14 | 19 | -5 |
Newcastle and Arsenal weren't a surprise, nor was Aston Villa. Haven't followed Southampton that much but the last match I did watch was 0-0 until Shane Long came on late to score two goals - that's one +2 right there.
An addictive site, be careful if you go there.
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