[dmichulke]

Thank you for the warm words, I guess the reason is my occupation plus the fact that I just spend my last few weeks watching many games with family and friends.

> I'm not sure what you mean with the last one, but I think this could be a nice one - if you mean "times you lost possession in your own half"

Almost, England lost the ball frequently (> 50+x% with a large x AFAI could see) due to the keeper sending out long balls. I'd like to measure that somehow. Could be done via number of seconds in possession after a goal kick, an indicator whether a hypothetical 85% marker of the field was reached or measuring whether the ball was at least 5x successfully passed (or resulted in a goal).

[smcl]

Ahhhh I see. Actually this is something I've really been curious about myself - whether the better strategy overall for a keeper returning the ball into open play (from goal kick or from hand) is to just boot it as far up-field as possible or passing it short to one of the defence or midfielders sitting deep.

Interestingly something like this is a tactic used in Rugby (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbti6mLvSJs). I used to play a lot of football when I was younger and at our level (waaaay down the scottish league pyramid) against tired, hungover or generally weak opposition, keeping them under pressure by dominating the territorial game but sacrificing possession was criminally underrated. Usually if you could keep hammering them for 60 minutes and had the legs to step up a gear in the last 30 or so you could grab a valuable goal or two :-)