Why I'm here

Albion Considered started off sometime in 2011 as a tactics blog about West Brom. At the time, football tactics was a niche topic, but one in which interest was growing fast. Sites like Zonal Marking were popularising football tactics and showed that there was a desire amongst fans to read more than the platitudes and hyperbole produced by more traditional sports media. Unsurprisingly, there was very little out there on football tactics relevant to West Brom. With platforms like Wordpress making it easy to write your own blog, and Twitter making it easy to promote, I decided to try and fill this West Brom-shaped hole.

And I did try it, for a bit. I quite liked doing it too. It made me examine matches more closely, and like football all the more because of it. Ultimately though I had to stop, partly because I couldn’t commit to the Friday-preview, Monday-review schedule, but also because I didn’t know anything about football tactics, something that was pretty obvious to anyone that read it. It’s certainly a pretty obvious flaw in most tactics blogs I read now.

I did still want a blog though. I wanted one not because I needed people to read my thoughts, but because I wanted to practice writing. I’m not a good writer, and I’d like to be better, and the only way to get better is to practice. I also wanted a kind of journal where I could record interesting articles I’d read, and what I thought about them. So why didn’t I just write a journal? Because the other purpose of this blog was the chance to play around with building a website. I’ve not ‘built’ AlbionConsidered.com in any sense of the word - it is fully designed and hosted by the amazing Squarespace - but it has given me an opportunity to mess around with CSS and a little HTML, and maybe one day I’ll have messed around enough to actually ‘build’ a site myself.

So, in order to achieve these three goals (practice writing, record interesting things I’ve read, teach myself about website building), I started writing again here, at Albion Considered. In both appearance and style of post it is an unashamed Marco.org rip-off (which is in itself a Daring Fireball rip-off) - that is to say each post will usually be a link to an article that I’ve read, a quoted passage from that article, and a line or paragraph of my own commentary on the issue addressed in that article. I read lots of different stuff, but expect that I’ll mainly be linking to articles about software product development, management and design - because those are things related to my work - as well as articles about football and West Brom, because this is still Albion Considered. There will also probably be links to nice photos, videos and tweets, and once in a while I might write slightly fuller, stand-alone posts of my own.

If you take any time to check out the rest of the site, you’ll see that I’ve actually been doing stuff here for a little while, and you may well wonder why I’ve bothered to write this post now, and why I keep shoving it in your faces on Twitter. The answer is that, whilst I’ve not been writing here to try to gain attention, I am doing it to try to make my writing better. When writing the stuff I’ve posted here so far, I have sometimes noticed that I wasn’t writing properly, that I wasn’t taking enough care with my words nor taking the time to proof-read and edit. Clearly I wasn’t really practicing, and I think this was because there was no pressure, because I knew no one would see it or care. I’d pay more attention, I thought to myself, if there was a greater likelihood that someone might, possibly, actually read what I was writing.

This is why I’ve decided to start promoting the posts I write. Just a bit, anyway. It’s not going to be a “plz share/RT” kind of a thing, so you don’t have to worry about any of that. The theory is that just knowing people might follow a link on Twitter will shame me into trying harder.

So, welcome to Albion Considered. Hope you enjoy following along.

Four things from West Brom v Burnley

1 - Dorrans is still not a winger, but maybe that's OK

Dorrans has been frequently played on the right of midfield this season, and from his performances there it is quite clear that he’s not a natural winger. With Andre Wisdom played behind Dorrans and out of position at full-back, the right-side of the pitch against Tottenham was often a dead-end. Neither player was willing or able to take on the defender.

Against Burnley, Irvine stuck with the same XI as against Spurs but this time things were different. Though nominally positioned on the right again, Dorrans, whether on the manager’s instructions or on his own impetus, spent most of the match in central, advanced positions. The benefits were clear, with Dorrans taking up this position both to assist Berahino’s second as well as to sweep in Gamboa’s cut-back cross.

Foregoing a traditional winger in favour of the drifting Dorrans has another advantage. As we saw at the weekend, this team selection gives a midfield base of competent, comfortable passers - Dorrans, Morrison, Brunt and Gardner (more on him later) - which allowed us to dominate possession and, once we’d taken the lead, restrict Burnley’s chances of getting back into the match.

2 - Lescott and Dawson, master and apprentice?

Last week Lescott was the defender we all raved about. This week, deservedly, it is Dawson getting all of the attention thanks to his goal and all-round performance. Dawson was always known to have potential but it is the pairing of him with Lescott that has worked wonders. How great must it be for a young centre-back to start alongside as experienced and successful a player as Lescott. I feel worried for McAuley...

3 - Berahino's running

The most impressive thing about Berahino’s recent performances has not been his scoring but his work-rate. And of course, the latter begets the former. Time and again, both against Spurs and against Burnley, Berahino made darting runs in behind the opposition defence, only a fraction of which were spotted by his teammates. That isn’t a criticism of our midfielders’ vision, but a compliment to Berahino that he kept at it even when he wasn’t receiving the ball. His persistence was rewarded against Burnley when Dorrans spotted Berahino’s cleverly curved run and poked the ball into the striker’s path, a pass that he calmly slotted into the bottom corner.

4 - Craig Gardner for England

Ok, maybe not just yet, but if Lescott is surely our best signing of the summer, might Gardner turn out to be an unexpected close second? He has settled in immediately, and his combination of box-to-box runs, strong tackles and tidy passing has, so far, managed to displace Mulumbu from the deep-midfield role.

The cost of an Apple Watch

I wrote last week that I expected the top-end Apple Watches to be priced at close to $10,000. If anyone was in any doubt as to the price of this thing, Jason Snell shared an interesting tidbit on his new Six Colors blog:

“Here’s one sign just how luxe the Apple Watch Edition will be: When I was in Cupertino I got to handle the box that it will come in.

Yes, there’s a special box. It’s covered in leather. Inside is a magnetic charging cradle, and on the back of the box base is a slot into which you plug a Lightning connector. That’s right: The Apple Watch Edition is so fancy that the box is its own accessory.”

Related: Check out this week's episode of Accidental Tech Podcast for an interesting discussion of how - like, where and in what format? - Apple will sell the 'Edition' Apple Watch.

Three and a half things from Spurs v WBA

1 - Dorrans is not a winger

My favourite current West Brom player, probably, is Graham Dorrans. When he first broke into the team he was a breath of fresh air - his quick, forward-looking passing a welcome contrast to Jonathan Greening’s ponderous presence in central midfield. And that’s where he’s at his best, in the centre, not stuck out on the wing as he has been in recent games. Dorrans is a great passer but hasn’t got the tricks or pace required to beat a man, and with only Berahino in the box on Sunday he was reluctant to cross the ball. Things were made worse with Wisdom sat behind him. Wisdom looks very strong defensively but, perhaps unsurprisingly for a converted centre-back, rather unsure of himself going forward. With Dorrans not able to take it round Danny Rose, and with Wisdom unwilling to overlap, passing the ball out to the right-wing frequently became a dead-end. The solution, surely, is to switch Dorrans for someone pacier and more skillful like Varela or Blanco. Alternatively, if Irvine wants to stick with Dorrans on the right then Gamboa should be preferred to Wisdom at full-back.

2 - Lescott debut worth the wait

West Brom signed 10 new players during the summer, but many fans have been left frustrated with how long it’s taken to get them match fit. Lescott in particular was a concern. When his signing was first announced, my immediate thought was “he’s too good for us, surely there must be something that we don’t know?” That ‘something we don’t know’ I assumed to be a chronic injury, and with Lescott struggling with calf and knee problems all summer and missing the first 4 games of the season, things didn’t look good for his Albion career. Based on Sunday’s performance, however, I needn’t have worried. Lescott looked a class above anything we’ve seen for a while, confidently commanding the defence as well as making a vital last-ditch, last man tackle as Adebayor sprinted through into the box. It certainly made a nice change to Olsson’s misguided passes and hot-headed confrontations.

3 - Sessegnon is frustrating but necessary

He may be frustrating, but Sessegnon is easily our most dangerous attacking player. His ability to receive the ball with back to goal and, quick-as-a-flash, spin away from his marker is unlike anything else we have in the team. He can go missing for large chunks of games, and several times against Tottenham  he gave the ball away in dangerous areas, but his flair is necessary in our efficient but otherwise unflashy midfield.

3.5  - Foster's kicking

Seriously, what was up with that? Almost every kick - from the floor and out of his hands - would sail over the heads of Berahino and the Spurs defence.

The Apple Watch

I enjoyed (and agreed) with Gruber’s piece on the Apple Watch. Two (related) points in particular stood out to me.

1 - The Price

“The most fun I’ve had over the past week is speculating with friends about how much the different tiers of Apple Watch are going to cost. One thing that is absolutely clear, to me at least: when Tim Cook said the starting price is $349, that’s for the aluminum and glass Sport edition. My guesses for starting prices:

Apple Watch Sport (aluminum/glass): $349 (not a guess)
Apple Watch (stainless steel/sapphire): $999
Apple Watch Edition (18-karat gold/sapphire): $4999

Most people think I’m joking when I say the gold ones are going to start at $5,000. I couldn’t be more serious. I made a friendly bet last week with friends on the starting price for the Edition models, and I bet on $9,999.”

I agree. They are (at least with the - strangely named - Edition version) not trying to make a smart watch - they are making a piece of functional jewelry. It will be priced in the thousands, and everyone is going to be appalled.

2 - Obsolescence

“But Apple Watch is not just a piece of jewelry, and it’s not a mechanical device. It’s a computer. And all computers have lifespans measured in just a handful of years before obsolescence.”

This is what I keep coming back to. A high-end watch like a Rolex is a once-in-a-lifetime purchase for all but the super-wealthy. It is a family heirloom, something that you can expect to last for generations all the while working as well as the day you bought it.

Tech products on the other hand improve markedly, year over year. Everyone knows Moore’s law. There is no doubt that the 2016 Apple Watch will be better than the 2015 version (in fact I’d expect the 2015 version, like all 1st generation products, to be pretty crappy…). The traditional 3-5 yeah tech upgrade cycle, let alone the 1-2 year phone upgrade cycle, simply does not fit with what might be a $10,000 product.

I assume Apple must have a plan for this, but I have no idea what it is.

 

Ricky Gervais Broke My Heart

I enjoyed (and agreed with) this piece by Lindy West, for Jezebel:

“I’m mad at Ricky Gervais for a lot of things: for the monstrously dehumanizing way he talks about fat people; for lending his voice to the myopic throng railing against “political correctness”; and, most recently, for implying that Jennifer Lawrence—along with countless other women—is complicit in her own sexual victimization, because she chose to take photos of her body in the (apparently illusory) privacy of home.

But none of his stances are remarkable—I hear them daily from barely pubescent boys on Twitter. More than anything, I’m mad at Ricky Gervais for taking Ricky Gervais away from me.”

I love the Office, and the Karl Pilkington podcasts, and Extras was really OK, but Gervais himself has turned into a quite awful person.

The Down and Dirty History of TMZ

In depth look at TMZ and the grubby celebrity gossip world it inhabits, by Anne Helen Petersen, for Buzzfeed (itself hardly a bastion of 'proper' journalism):

“Even before the TV show made the TMZ “morning meeting” famous, the staff would circle around Levin, standing at a white board, and go around the circle with their pitch/tip/idea for a story. Every employee was responsible for one; if someone took your idea before you did, you were screwed; after enough screwups, you were done.”

This, along with the depressing predictable reports of misogyny and sexual harassment, make TMZ sound like a truly awful place to work.

You Are Not Late

“So, the truth: Right now, today, in 2014 is the best time to start something on the internet. There has never been a better time in the whole history of the world to invent something. There has never been a better time with more opportunities, more openings, lower barriers, higher benefit/risk ratios, better returns, greater upside, than now. Right now, this minute. This is the time that folks in the future will look back at and say, “Oh to have been alive and well back then!”

I think I speak for everyone under 50 when I say: "I fucking hope so".

Thinking About What You Read

Maria Konnikova, for the New Yorker:

“When Ziming Liu, a professor at San Jose State University whose research centers on digital reading and the use of e-books, conducted a review of studies that compared print and digital reading experiences, supplementing their conclusions with his own research, he found that several things had changed. On screen, people tended to browse and scan, to look for keywords, and to read in a less linear, more selective fashion. On the page, they tended to concentrate more on following the text. Skimming, Liu concluded, had become the new reading: the more we read online, the more likely we were to move quickly, without stopping to ponder any one thought.”

This encapsulates one of the reasons that I want to write Albion Considered. I do pretty much all of my non-fiction reading online. Deciding that I'm going to post a comment about an article forces me to think about what it is that I've read, rather than jumping quickly onto the next thing in my 'to-read' list.

Joy's Notebook

Leisa Reichelt, on the unusability of internal systems:

“Internal systems are the tools we give our frontline staff, the people who are in charge of the customer experience for the face to face and telephone channels. If you pay attention to people using these systems (either out of general professional interest or because you’re fortunate enough to work with the on a project), you’ll find that notebooks like Joy’s are not uncommon. They’re everywhere.

They are everywhere because the people who bought or made the system didn’t even think about the experience for internal staff. The internal staff who are stuck using it are so far away from the people who bought that expensive crap that they’ll never know how awful it is (or their jobs are in peril so they don’t dare complain).”

I think anyone that has ever worked for a big company knows how bad internal systems can be. Unlike customer facing products (because yes, internal systems are a 'product' too), internal software is not exposed to market competition. Without that competitive pressure, the people high up in an organisation with the power to have these systems improved (incidentally, these 'high-ups' will usually never have to touch the internal systems) will never be interested enough to do just that, and so these crappy internal systems live on much (much, much) longer than they otherwise would.

What's Wrong with England?

Twitter has been full of praise for this Rob Bagchi article, for The Telegraph, assessing what went wrong for England in Brazil. Bagchi lays the blame with Hodgson, although his primary argument seems to be that, for his (admittedly too-large) salary, he should have done better. This argument provides no solution, deftly sidestepping the obvious question: if not Hodgson then who? Bagchi doesn’t provide an answer.

His real criticism though is of the players, and here at least it is fair to apportion the fault - or at least a large slice of it - with Hodgson for picking those underperformers. I do at least agree with Bagchi on particular were the culpable players:

“Yet anyone who had studied Steven Gerrard’s performance for Liverpool against Chelsea after his slip helped Demba Ba score, and saw him resort to positional indiscipline and playing the Hail Mary passes he has hit throughout his career when rattled, was troubled by his deployment in a central two.”
“Frank McLintock tells the story of how when he started playing at centre-half for Arsenal in 1969 after 11 years as a wing-half, the left-back, Bob McNab, used to scream at him, badgering him to stay in position in the most impertinent and profane terms even though McLintock was one of the most inspirational captains in the history of English club football. When Wayne Rooney was consigned to the left-flank and Italy flooded behind him and overloaded Leighton Baines, the left-back did not harangue or even plead with his team-mate to help him out. Gerrard, in temperament a leader by example we are repeatedly told, did not lay down the law either.”

Bagchi’s article highlights the difficulty of finding any concrete problem with the England team. There is no doubt that there is talent there, with many of the squad playing pivotal roles for successful, top-level teams. Whilst Hodgson may have felt incapable of leaving out big-names such as Gerrard and Rooney (and I think there can be little debate that England would, at least, have been no worse off had those two not featured in Brazil), he has shown himself to value reputation far less than many of his predecessors. As for Bagchi’s criticism of the FA, he limits himself only to an attack on their overspending, which can bear no logical link on the team’s poor performance.

So what was and is the problem with England?

I don’t know either.

The Last Days of Eazy E

“We’re outside, the sun’s going down, and he had a trunk full of weed. I’d always hit him up,” says Benyad. “So we’re smoking a blunt right outside of the studio and he had a mean cough. I was like, ‘Yo, you should chill with the weed for a minute, man. Take care of that cold first. You’re not gonna get better if you keep smoking weed.’ He was like, ‘Nah whatever man, don’t worry about it.’ A week later, he was in the hospital.”

How to Talk to Customers

“What started as a great interview became mediocre (at best) when the participant asked a simple question… and my client answered.

The problem wasn’t the question, it was the way it was answered.

You see, my client gave a thorough answer that showed his expertise.”

I see this often, and am guilty of it myself. You have to fight the natural urge to try to 'impress' the customer with how smart you are and how you have all these ideas for how to make your product better; because if you do 'impress' the customer, you might also intimidate them. If you show how knowledgeable you are, they won't want to embarrass themselves by revealing that they know less than you do. This means that they are likely to simply agree with what you are saying, rather than answer your questions honestly, and so the whole thing will be a waste of time.

Lionel Messi is Impossible

Benjamin Morris, for FiveThirtyEight:

“By now I’ve studied nearly every aspect of Messi’s game, down to a touch-by-touch level: his shooting and scoring production; where he shoots from; how often he sets up his own shots; what kind of kicks he uses to make those shots; his ability to take on defenders; how accurate his passes are; the kind of passes he makes; how often he creates scoring chances; how often those chances lead to goals; even how his defensive playmaking compares to other high-volume shooters.

And that’s just the stuff that made it into this article. I arrived at a conclusion that I wasn’t really expecting or prepared for: Lionel Messi is impossible.”