D uring the World Cup last year, the thriller writer Jeremy Duns, who by his own admission is not much of a football fan, asked why so many goalkeepers tended to punt the ball long down the pitch, which meant possession was lost more than half the time. It is one of those questions that seems at first sight naive but that, once you try to answer it, makes you interrogate a lot of basic assumptions about the game.
Goalkeepers kick it long because, well, why? You try to formulate an answer: to get the ball away from their goal and nearer the opponents goal. But then you imagine @jeremydunss scorn and given he is a notoriously tenacious Twitter combatant, imagined conversations with him are a good way of testing any theory. Given there is a (significantly) greater than 50% chance of possession being lost, that means the keeper is giving away the ball, the thing you need if you are going to score. Doesnt that simply gift the initiative to the opposition?
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