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F1 Singapore GP: formula 1 overtaking 0

Hamilton was supreme and won the race. Button doggedly consolidated his world title hopes by recovering from a poor qualifying session to finish ahead of team-mate Barrichello. Those were the headline messages from the 2009 Singapore Grand Prix. But, after all the talk about the race-fixing that went on at this circuit last season, this correspondent was determined to probe a much more fundamental question: What was the quality of the racing on show? Or rather, apart from the special atmosphere created by this being a night-time race, what was the real excitement value?

The absolute measure of excitement in F1 is the amount of overtaking, the amount of honest, wheel-to-wheel racing that achieves changes in position: this is what should make the sparks fly. Having touched on the lack of overtaking in F1 in one or two previous posts, now it was time to sit down for a race - with notepad rather geekily at the ready - and record the hard(-ish) facts. How many genuine overtaking manoeuvres were clearly visible to the average viewer watching the 2009 Singapore GP on television? We can exclusively reveal the answer to be ... wait for it... None. That’s right - a big fat, nothingy, zilchy None.

We should clarify that our count does not include changes of position owing to first-lap jockeying for position off the starting grid, exciting as this is. Nor does it include a host of other possible reasons for changes in position, including: pit-stops, differential fuel/tyre strategies and drive-through penalties; a driver profiting from a mistake or a technical fault that slows a driver ahead of him; a backmarker being lapped; or a driver letting another through in order, for example, to make up for a transgression for which he hopes to avoid punishment after gaining an unfair advantage. There are, admittedly, grey areas: Is, for example, a “mistake” a simple driver error or the result of concerted pressure from behind?

In Singapore there were just three cases where it appeared (to this viewer, at least) that some overtaking might be taking place: incidents involving Raikkonen apparently taking Buemi for 12th place, a dispute between Trulli and Rosberg over 13th, and Rosberg taking Alguersuari for 15th. But in at least two of these cases, it looked as though a mistake might have been involved. Nor were any of the incidents (again, at least as far as this viewer was concerned) sufficiently well framed or explained in the coverage to be clear-cut sources of overtaking enjoyment. (Added to which, a quick Rosberg had in effect found himself artificially out of position, relegated down the field after serving a drive-through penalty. And Alguersuari and Buemi were quite possibly suffering from brake problems - a technical disadvantage).

It is perhaps no great surprise that Singapore is not a place where there is an abundance of overtaking. It is, after all, a street circuit, and street circuits are notoriously difficult for overtaking - Monaco just about gets away with it because of all its glamour and F1 tradition. The first obvious conclusion is: no more street circuits than we have already, please. The trouble is, there’s not a whole lot of overtaking at other tracks either, so we shouldn’t just pick on Singapore and its glittering skyline. More broadly, as an F1 fan, it is finally time to tell it like it is: it is imperative that more be done to facilitate overtaking in the sport. The new technical regulations introduced for this season may have helped a little bit, but not nearly enough.

We can only hope that there is an Overtaking Working Group out there still conscious of the need to make changes. Unfortunately, the outlook may not be too good. Re-fuelling is being scrapped for next season: this may promote a more straight fight but it will also - by removing the possibility for drivers to adopt different fuel strategies in each race - take away a key way of shuffling the pack. And last we heard (though we’d be delighted to hear clarification of its precise status), the KERS ‘power-boost’ system won’t be on the grid anymore in 2010 (possibly, who knows, because it would just be too heavy to have the KERS on board along with all the fuel needed to get to the end of a race without refuelling). So that’s another joker-in-the-pack gone (albeit not a very widely used or popular one). There’s just one thing for it: install spray systems at all circuits and make every race a wet race. Now that would be entertainment.

Kasparov 9 Karpov 3.

In a somewhat kitsch historical salutation of their legendary 1984 duel, the two great old Soviet chess grand masters Anatoly Karpov and Garry Kasparov did battle across the 8x8 once more in Valencia, Spain last week.

“But chess is a game, not a sport!” I hear you cry. True enough, if you impose some basic hardcore cardiovascular constraint on the reckoning. But the natural vigour of many of the great chess players is undeniable; Bobby Fischer and Garry Kasparov in particular possessed a frankly frightening primal force, creative and destructive in equal measure, that no golfer, for instance, has ever impressed me with. And, unlike most passive sports, it is face-to-face combat. The latter day figures of Karpov and Kasparov are admittedly rather less physically robust than in their prime (to say the least in Karpov’s case!) but it is an opportunity to look back over their last 25 years.

The 1984 contest is fancifully seen as a metaphor for the collapse of the old Soviet Union. The 33 year-old Anatoly Karpov, reigning World Champion, was cast as the clean cut establishment figure against the 21 year-old brilliant brooding upstart from Azerbaijan, Garry Kasparov. It was an odd affair; in a first-to-six wins match, Karpov raced into a 4-0 lead after nine games, after which there were 17 drawn games. A further Karpov win was followed by another long drawn sequence until Kasparov registered his first victory. The latter had dragged the contest back to 5-3, when the governing body FIDE called off the match on ‘health grounds’. The spectre of political involvement was rather obvious. However, in the rematch the following year, Kasparov dethroned Karpov to become the youngest ever World Champion. The two would contest the World Championship a further three times upto 1990, Kasparov always prevailing in close matches.

In 1993 Kasparov broke away from FIDE to form his own ‘Professional Chess Association’, first defending his title against Nigel Short, as many of us in the UK remember. Further into the 90s and the chess landscape changed from man vs. man to man vs. machine, as computational power improved to the degree whereby it could match and beat almost any human. But not immediately Kasparov, who, in his first battle with IBM’s ‘Deep Blue’ Supercomputer in 1996, emerged triumphant, winning 4-2. It was to be a short-lived victory for mankind however, as, in the much publicised rematch the following year, Kasparov lost. The contest induced a kind of paranoia in Kasparov, who, after suffering early setbacks, became convinced that no Artificial Intelligence could be making some of the moves he was seeing and that there must be a “ghost in the machine”, a team of human grand masters supplementing the raw processing power of Deep Blue with in-game human intuition. Game Over:  Kasparov and the Machine was an engaging if overly-conspiratorial (pro-Kasparov, anti-IBM) documentary film about the contest.

Back to the all-human encounters, and Kasparov lost his crown to Vladimir Kramnik in 2000. Meanwhile, Karpov had been the parallel FIDE champion from 1993 to 1999. Kasparov gave up competitive chess in 2005, still ranked as the overall number one player, citing a lack of new goals; Karpov also had his problems with FIDE and gave up his title after a political dispute but has continued, off and on, still just ranked inside the FIDE top 100 in 2009. Both men are more engaged in political activities these days.

What happened to the two Ks in Valencia? On Tuesday and Wednesday there were four games in the ‘semi-rapid’ format, each player starting with 25 minutes on the clock. Kasparov took these 3-1. In the eight ‘blitz’ matches on Thursday (5 minutes starting time), Karpov won the first with the Black pieces but, after a draw, Kasparov rattled off the next five games, with the last game drawn. So, 9-3 to Kasparov overall, who had seemed the more focussed of the two throughout.

 

 

The Bundesliga is back: how the 2009/10 season is shaping up

Unlike the English Premiership, and the leagues in Spain, Italy and many other countries, the new German Bundesliga season has got under way with maybe 8 or 9 teams, i.e. half the league, in with a chance of winning the title. Although Bayern Munich remains the bookmakers’ favourite (by some distance), at the start of the season the bookies reckoned teams as obscure as Hoffenheim had more chance of taking the title than Aston Villa or Manchester City in England, or Fiorentina in Italy. After all, Wolfsburg came from nowhere to win it last year. Indeed all German neutrals were delighted that Bayern started the season so poorly under their new coach Louis Van Gaal (2 points from the first 3 games).

One thing football fans often forget is that the German League is in fact the best supported league in Europe in terms of crowd numbers. Logical, I suppose, as it also has the biggest population. In the build up to the World Cup in 2006, many of the leading stadiums had a facelift – and Bayern Munich and Borussia Mönchengladbach built brand new stadiums – and many of them (Dortmund, Hamburg, Köln, Schalke) have an atmosphere as good as anything in the Premiership. However, this advantage has been lost to the better TV deals negotiated in England, Spain and Italy, which allows those clubs to buy the best players, and leaves the Bundesliga punching below its weight. (Things are slowly changing though, and it is interesting to note that for the first time this season only 5 of the 9 Bundesliga games take place at the traditional 3.30pm Saturday afternoon slot. As well as one Friday evening game (8.30), there's a game on Saturday evening (6.30), and 2 on Sunday (3.30 and 5.30). Good news for German couch potatoes, methinks). In summer 2007 – after Bayern had had a disastrous season, failing to qualify for the Champions League – they splashed out on Frank Ribery and Luca Toni, the biggest name signings seen for many a year. Is it symbolic that both Ribery and Toni were expected to leave Bayern before the transfer window closed? Even though they stayed, I wouldn’t be surprised if one or the other leaves at Christmas.

With Diego leaving for Juventus, the Bundesliga lost arguably its most creative player – and the most interesting new names arriving in Germany pre-season were probably Pavel Pogrebnyak (to Stuttgart – but only after the 2006/7 Champions failed to reach agreement with Klaas-Jan Huntelaar over his wage demands) and Anatoly Tymoschchuk (to Bayern Munich) – names unlikely to boost season-ticket sales. Of course the only exception was the late signature of Arjen Robben to Bayern Munich – who got 2 goals on his debut a couple of days later. Apart from Robben, the biggest transfers in Germany this summer were “domestic”. Lucas Podolski left Bayern Munich to return to his beloved 1 FC Köln, and Bayern forked out some €30 million on Mario Gomez from Stuttgart and took Ivica Olic on a free transfer from Hamburg. While Gomez has attracted headlines from the foreign press about his dire performances for Germany - see his remarkable miss against Austria in EURO2008 (and an identical one in an earlier friendly) - he has probably been the best striker in the Bundesliga for 3 seasons now, shooting Stuttgart to the title 2 years ago. The concept of buying the best players from rival teams in the same league - in part, to weaken them - is a tactic used by rich clubs across the world. In this case, it will also strengthen Bayern as Gomez is now ahead of Klose and Toni in the pecking order. (For the record, Toni made his debut last week in the German 3rd Division playing for Bayern Reserves!) Olic can play a bit, too.

No, the new season is not startling for the close-season transfers – but for the managerial carousel. Only 8 of last season’s 18 teams went into the first game of the season with the same Manager as in May! And one of them (Dieter Hecking at Hannover 96) was sacked after 3 games! The most amazing one for me was Mainz 05, which got promoted last season having finished second in the 2. Bundesliga. They got knocked out of the Cup in the 1st Round, and then sacked their Manager 2 days before the 1st League game of the season! Can’t help feeling that a few more may follow before May 2010. Curiously, both Hannover and Mainz have appointed untried managers from within the club, e.g. the second team coach - presumably because they have had to pay off the ex-Manager, and a cheap coach is particularly attractive.

So who are all these teams who might win the league? Below is a brief word about all of the clubs, more or less in my subjective order of expectation. Before that, I would just like to pick out a couple of players who might shine this season – and at next summer’s World Cup. The most obvious guy is Werder Bremen’s Mesut Özil, who is probably good enough to step into Diego’s shoes. I would argue that he’s probably the most creative player Germany has had since Mehmet Scholl, i.e. in the last 10-15 years. He scored the goal that won the Cup last May, and seemingly won the European Under-21 Final against England by himself (aided by woeful defending, I seem to recall). Quantum of Sport’s own worldinmotion thought he was quite useful in the recent Germany-South Africa game. We’ll see how he manages to combine with his new teammate Marco Marin, signed from Mönchengladbach – an exciting dribbler, who has broken into the national team recently. The other names I wanted to mention are 2 keepers – both baby-faced under 25-year-olds, who have come through in the past couple of years: René Adler of Bayer Leverkusen and Manuel Neuer of Schalke. Bayern has already tried to sign Neuer.

F1 the loser as Renault let off hook over ‘crash-gate’

Renault were today handed a suspended sentence after it was found that members of the Formula One team conspired to fix the result of the 2008 Singapore Grand Prix, in which a crash by Nelson Piquet Jr paved the way for victory for his teammate Fernando Alonso. According to a statement released on the FIA website, “offences of this severity merit permanent disqualification from the FIA Formula One World Championship”. But it was decided to “suspend Renault F1’s disqualification until the end of the 2011 season”, such that “the World Motor Sport Council will only activate this disqualification if Renault F1 is found guilty of a comparable breach during that time”. Renault’s bacon was saved, it would appear, because the two men Piquet said had asked him to crash - team boss Flavio Briatore and technical director Pat Symonds - last week parted company with the team in the wake of the allegations.

Apart from the suspended ban on the team, Briatore and Symonds are now subject to individual bans, with Briatore effectively being indefinitely ostracised from the sport. Piquet received immunity from individual sanction owing to his role in bringing the scandal to light, while it was found that Alonso had not been involved. In addition, Renault will pay costs and a contribution to FIA safety work. Is all this enough? The answer has to be No. It is true that firm action has been taken against the individuals found to be the key instigators. But there is also such a thing as collective responsibility, and the powers-that-be have missed the opportunity to send the strongest possible message that cheating of this nature in F1 is unacceptable. Unless further details are still to emerge as the dust settles on today’s decisions, it is perhaps surprising that something more concrete than a suspended sentence couldn’t have been imposed on Renault. What about a hefty fine? Or perhaps strip Renault of their constructors’ points for this season or retrospectively for last season? - at least the ten points they won fraudulently, as it now turns out, in Singapore. Could it be that the authorities were worried about losing a team like Renault from F1 altogether, as car companies study their crisis-hit books? Maybe, but ultimately F1 is bigger than any one team and respect for the rules is paramount.

The reason why a tougher response was needed is, firstly, due to the nature of the offence. Formula 1 is notorious for its behind-the-scenes machinations and for matters having to be settled off the track rather than on it, with its spy scandals and disputes over technical regulations - and the use of ‘team orders’ to favour one driver over another has long been a bone of contention. But what took place in Singapore was evidently of a whole new dimension and amounted to cheating of the sort that, as far as this correspondent remembers, has never been seen in the sport before. As the World Motor Sport Council itself says, the breaches of the rules were “of unparalleled severity”. Everybody was cheated, not least the fans in Singapore who paid good money (and it is good money in F1) to see a true-run race that was actually a charade. Had I been there, I’d now be sorely tempted to go knocking on Renault’s door asking for my money back - for the race ticket, not to mention the plane fare. Being told, “Sorry, Mr Briatore’s not here anymore”, wouldn’t really cut it.

Another reason why stronger action was needed is because of the untold consequences the fixing incident had not just for the Singapore race itself but for the broader destiny of the 2008 world championship. Brazil’s Felipe Massa was leading at the time of the crash and looking good for a victory that would have seen him overtake Britain’s Lewis Hamilton in the nip-and-tuck battle for the driver’s title. It was under the safety car conditions precipitated (deliberately) by Piquet that Massa had a disastrous pit-stop which led to him driving away from his bay, in a moment of grotesque comedy, with the fuel-hose still attached to his car. He lost too much time to score points while Hamilton finished third, a crucial swing late in the championship that Massa eventually lost by a single point. Logically speaking, the Singapore result should not now stand. Of course, Ferrari should have got Massa’s pit-stop right, and anyway reopening the result of the 2008 championship now would be folly. But it is an episode worth recalling because it illustrates just how far-reaching the consequences of Renault’s irresponsible ploy were (to say nothing of the potential safety implications).

Ultimately, the ‘crash-gate’ affair is a sad indictment of the current state of Formula 1 as a whole. This is not to condone what was done at Renault, but the question has to be asked: Would this have happened if it were easier to overtake in F1? The significant rules changes introduced for this season shuffled the pack but ultimately have not done enough to boost overtaking, of which there is still a lamentable lack. Alonso was quick in Singapore, very quick, but had a problem in qualifying that left him 15th on the starting grid. One may presume that those involved in the conspiracy, probably seeing little prospect of points - let alone a win - felt robbed of an opportunity they felt ‘entitled’ to and for that reason decided that they had to do something ‘creative’. Again, this is not to condone cheating, but that doesn’t mean that ‘crash-gate’ shouldn’t come as a big wake-up call for the very future of Formula 1.

Man Utd 4 Man City 3: error-strewn and compelling to the final whistle

Man Utd triumphed in a gloriously see-saw derby thanks to a dramatic last-gasp winner that preserves the balance of power in Manchester. Utd fans will rightly argue that Sir Alex Ferguson’s men were the better side in the second half and deserved the win. Yet even they may be wondering just where the six minutes of injury time came from that allowed Michael Owen to pinch all three points right at the death. Man City boss Mark Hughes - seen on kick-off checking his watch - will no doubt be livid.

It was a controversy that topped off a remarkable match: remarkable on the whole more for the number of errors than the quality on display. Arguably all seven goals came from mistakes: City caught napping at a throw-in - Utd take an early lead through Rooney; Foster in goal for Utd making a howler from a nothing through-ball that allows Utd old-boy Tevez to steal the ball and supply Barry’s calm equaliser; Fletcher rising above Barry, who wasn’t properly goal-side, to head Utd ahead; Evra giving the ball away in midfield, leading to Bellamy - only half closed down by O’Shea - rifling superbly into the top corner for 2-2; Fletcher scoring again with his head, again more or less unmarked; Ferdinand inexplicably giving the ball away at the back with an embarrassing scooped pass that allows Bellamy a run on goal and finish for 3-3 (Foster not exactly covering himself in glory either at the near post); and then, finally, Owen - who had hardly had a kick as a late substitute - allowed too much space before poking home the late, late winner with pretty much the last touch. Basic errors will dog a team at any level of the game, and both sides go away from this encounter finding that this is something they will have to eliminate, for all the millions of pounds-worth of talent on show.

Apart from the late drama and the errors, what does the biggest Manchester derby for many a year tell us about the much-talked-about pecking order in the city? In truth, the first half didn’t tell us all that much - it was a largely scrappy affair, riddled with fouls. Big-spending City, however, could easily have been in front just before the break as Tevez hit a post, before another City new boy Lescott blazed over the bar. In the second period, Utd upped their game, got the ball down and were camped in the City half, Hughes’ men looking like they were going to be happy to settle for a draw at 2-2. To be fair to Man C, they were missing an array of attacking options (Adebayor, Santa Cruz, Robinho) which meant they were devoid of aerial threat up front throughout the match and seemingly short of options in terms of second-half substitutions. City’s two second-half goals were against the run of play. But for Berbatov missing a couple of point-blank headers, the game could have been won more comfortably by Utd - Berbatov increasingly looking like the subject of some unfortunate curse, and Given in goal for City able to boost his credentials as one of the top flight’s top shot-stoppers, saving well from Giggs too. Giggs, for his part, was vintage down the left flank - arguably given too much space all afternoon but rolling back the years with some jinking runs and supplying one cross with the outside of the boot (again not converted by Berbatov) that was simply sublime.

Ultimately, barring a surprise at Stamford Bridge later in the day, it was a derby that would leave the top of the Premier League with a reassuringly/depressingly (delete as appropriate) familiar look about it. The status quo is intact - for now.