(Note: the following is the Soccer Talk column from the May 10 issue of SA to which MLS Commissioner Doug Logan responds on the MLS web site.) Goalscoring in soccer has always been something of a mystery. There don’t seem to be any rules about it, certainly no logic. Coaches — modern coaches, that is — have tried to get it all worked out, have created many wise and wonderful plans and schemes that must result in goals being scored. But somehow, soccer has a habit of upsetting those plans. I was listening to a BBC radio broadcast some weeks back, the results of Premier League games were coming through, and two top clubs were in rampant form, one had scored six, the other five. “What will that mean when they meet next week?” asked the commentator. “Nil-nil,” was his colleague’s deadpan and eminently sensible reply. Goals cannot simply be supplied to order. They come when you’re least expecting them, they refuse to come when everything says they damn well should come. If you want proof that goalscoring is something a little bit different, that this most vital of soccer activities doesn’t quite fit into the neat pattern of the game that has been drawn up by soccer’s clever theorists, take a look at some of the top goalscorers themselves. It’s decidedly awkward to have to admit that many of them are not particularly skilled, not great passers of the ball, can’t dribble, not overly fast. Yet they get the ball into the net. The classic example was Germany’s Gerd Mueller, who somehow repeatedly maneuvered his anything-but-athletic figure into position to score goals, buckets of them. That, it was said, was all he could do: score goals. Difficult to argue with that. There are still players like that around — Oliver Bierhoff and Christian Vieri come quickly to mind. Closer to home, there’s Giovanni Savarese, who may not be the most technically gifted player, but wherever he’s been — youth soccer, college soccer, A-League, MLS — he’s been his team’s top scorer. These are players who make their own rules. Often they get tagged as “selfish” — as though it doesn’t help the team to score goals! The chances are high — it’s almost a certainty, in fact — that such players really don’t understand how they do it. In his wonderfully lively biography Football Memories*, Brian Glanville recounts the story of Arthur Rigby, a former England international, who in his later years turned to drink. Arriving late — and very drunk — for a club game, he was rushed into the showers to see if that would sober him up, then pushed on to the field and stuck out on the left wing. The idea was to keep the ball away from him. He ended up scoring a hat trick. It could be, then, that getting your center forward well and truly sloshed right before game time is the secret to more goal scoring. It doesn’t seem to me any wilder a notion than the one put forward recently by Commissioner Doug Logan to explain the current MLS goal drought. Cold weather, said Logan. Never heard that before. Meaning, I guess, that the Norwegians score fewer goals than the Italians. Not so. I checked: during the 1997-98 season, the sun-warmed Italians scored 2.75 goals per game, while the midnight-sun Norwegians managed 3.69. A few more stats. In 1954 we had the chilliest, dampest World Cup ever. That was the year they set the World Cup record of 5.38 goals per game, they haven’t even come close since then. In 1958 they took the World Cup to Sweden, the farthest north it’s ever been, and averaged 3.6 goals a game. Since then it’s always been below 3.00, despite some pretty hot tournaments in Mexico, Spain and the United States. Anyway, I had some memories of my own. 1947. The worst winter in living memory, one that brought war-destroyed Europe to its knees, one that nearly brought down the government in England. I was a shivering, teeth-chattering spectator at quite a few English First Division games that winter. There were 2.9 goals a game then — and the average didn’t get that high again until 1951. Maybe Doug Logan has been borrowing stats from baseball, where, I’m told, scores are higher in warm weather. It could be that he has something here, that he has discovered something that has escaped the notice of everyone in soccer for the past 160 years. This is exciting news, so I shall attempt to assist Logan in the establishment of a new dimension to soccer coaching. First, we must have the theoretical underpinning. Something like this, I think: cold weather means cold blood (though not for Norwegians, who are used to it); cold blood means sluggish reactions from goalscorers. So why aren’t defenders sluggish, too? Well, they are, but less so, because they’re a different type of personality. Anyway, goalscoring is all about split-second timing, defending is simply about getting in the way, so you can see why icicles in the blood stream have more effect on forwards. Then we need statistical backing. The stats I cited above are merely examples of what happens in practice. Bah. Let’s get to the theory. I have been doing some research on this matter, and am now happy to reveal my preliminary findings. My investigations have concentrated on finding a more convincing method of establishing when it’s cold. I want to know when people actually feel cold, rather than what the temperature charts say. I have compiled an inventory of the sales of long johns and attempted to correlate them with goalscoring. The results, so far are not too promising for the Logan camp. In fact, there seems to be no relationship at all. I turned, then to cold remedies — a sure sign of cold-weather discomfort. Again, no obvious correlation between sales and goals. But there is a complication here, in that some of these remedies contain stimulant drugs — ephedrine, for example — that might affect a player’s performance. Logan himself has greatly complicated this particular angle, by having MLS conduct tests for performance-enhancing drugs. But wait! While I was perusing the cold-remedy sales figures, the drug company guy cunningly inserted a sheet from the sales of their new wonder-laxative, Niagra (I think they’re trying to piggyback Viagra, but I could be wrong). Imagine my mounting excitement as I spotted a direct relationship: the more laxatives sold, the greater the number of goals! This is how the great scientific discoveries are made, the moment of inspired chance … now I know how Sir Alexander Fleming felt when he accidentally discovered penicillin. Could it be that a stoppage in the flow of goals mirrors a more widespread epidemic of clogged intestines? Is constipation at the bottom of the problem? Is the solution laxatives rather than tactics? I have more work to do on this, but I feel can commit myself to this extent: as a contribution to the mystery of goalscoring, the Logan Longjohn Factor is a non-starter; but Logan’s Laxative Law may yet revolutionize training routines throughout the soccer world. * Football Memories by Brian Glanville. Virgin Publishing Ltd., London 1999. L16.99.