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I write this weeks round-up before the England match against Ukraine takes place but with the encounter with Italy fresh in the memory. I'm still grappling with my overriding emotion from the game, it swings between:
a) Wow! We've beaten Italy away for the first time in over sixty years. This team is going places
b) We dug in when needed and while it wasn't pretty we got an admirable result.
c) I'm concerned about how momentum swung in the second half. We were lucky not to concede an equaliser.
d) If this team continues to drop deep to defend a lead against the big teams we will never win anything.
On reflection, I'd say I'm now somewhere between B & C. I can't help feeling we need to be more ruthless if we are to truly challenge the worlds (and Europes) best).
Onto the round-up and Frederic Fery summarises the Six Nations Rugby Union tournament since 2009 with this Bump Chart. What immediately jumped out to me was the sheer unpredictability of the tournament–apart from the wooden spoon which Italy have appeared to make their own again–with very rare consecutive champions. Is this one of the reasons why the Six Nations is so popular?
We move onto a number of football related vizzes now starting with our well known friend, Adam Green who has managed to turn a series of black and white striped images into a classy looking viz. In this case, those black and white strips below to his hometown club Grimsby Town. It was fun looking back through the ages and seeing the old kit manufacturers and sponsors. If anyone can think of a better sponsor than Findus I'd like to know about it! Anyone for a Crispy Pancake? Anyone remember what a Crispy Pancake is?!
There is simply loads to explore in this shot map viz from Ninad Barbadikar. Covering the top five leagues in Europe and shots from every player within those leagues this has to be explored interactively to be enjoyed and if you want to go crazy, remove all the filters to see every shot so far this season!
This next design oozes class, much like its subject matter, Mesut Ozil who, this week, retired from professional football. Samo Drole dug into the #makeovermonday archives to resurface this fantastic summary of Arsenal's 2018/2019 season in which Ozil appeared 24 times, scoring 5 goals. Opinions were often divided about Ozil's contribution with many questioning his desire and work ethic. Of course, it takes a mix of players to build a successful side but one that contributes as many assist and clear chances as Ozil did at his peak should be in any team.
We are all partial to a bit of map layer wizardry on the team and Aakarsh R debuts with this stunner as part of the collaboration with the #GamesNightViz team. Showcasing the top 10 players from FIFA23, Aakarsh combines beautiful design with well crafted tool tips. Great job, Aakarsh, we look forward to seeing more map layer magic from you in the future!
Finally, NCAA Womens Basketball has featured recently for #MakeoverMonday and Satoshi Ganeko treats us to something which I'm finding a hard time describing! The originality of this design showing the height distribution of the players by position had me staring, and then playing with this design for a while. If you have an interest in exploring more complicated geometry-related aspects in Tableau then I strongly recommend taking a look at this workbook.
That's all for this week, folks. Hope you all have a cracking week ahead and see you back here, same place, possibly same time (depending on who is writing the round-up!). And don't forget that tag #sportsvizsunday
Simon and the Sports Viz Sunday team.