Toronto_Mike said:
Ok dude your statement "This has nothing to do with middle Easterners still being involved in whatever tournaments of whatever nature" is complete bogus and i truely disagree. Like I said, DO NOT MAKE A SPORT POLITICAL. You have made this issue a lot worse than it is. First off, you are assuming that the players' families are in harms way. How would you know where they are? if they are in a safe zone or not? 2ndly if the Lebanese players didn't feel like playing, they would not have commited to this tournament in the first place.
see there are 2 sides to this, either the team can worry about whats going on back home, or they can do their country and family proud and put up a good performance. So what psychological train of thought is correct? Neither because either or can happen. BC is stating he believes the War will have too much of a negative impact on the players for them to compete while i believe the players can use the current issues at home as a driving force to compete harder. Like you said outside influences do come in, but how they effect is another issue. A death of a team member or someone involved within the organization could mean that team is dedicating that game or that season to that particular member. ARe they going to pack it in and lose? Of course not because they are DEDICATING that game/season to the loss one.
Politics in and of themselves
are irrelevant to my initial post, which is about adverse circumstances negatively affecting a team's performance. Those circumstances might be due to a volcano thats about to blow at anytime, or an earthquake, tsunami, civil riots, whatever. Whats behind the negative circumstances arent relevant here, all thats relevant
is that they exist in the first place to (possibly) wield such an affect.
You say I dont know if families are in harms way - how do you know theyre not? I'm bringing up obvious possibilities/angles that could affect the players minds. Israel was striking into the north with the dropping of bombs, basically ANYONE was in danger - and theres still gunfire being heard in the South while this *truce* is going on, a truce that could end at any moment.
The bottom line is the circumstances in this region are still very volatile. As for the Lebanese players feeling like playing, who is to say theres not massive fines for pulling out at this late stage? New Zealand was threatened with massive fines (running into the millions) by the International Cricket Board if they pulled out of a tour to Zimbabwe because of Mugabe's criminal treatment of his own people - The ICB said it was no excuse not to go (dont mix politics with sport). Whose to say it wasnt more viable to play on than pull out for the Lebanese basketball federation? And do you know for a fact individual Lebanese players havent pulled out because of whats going on? Its true these events may galvanise the teams players, but unlike the 9/11 situation, which was a one off event where football players didnt have to worry that their families might get hit in their apartment blocks by planes while they themselves were playing, thats not the case for the Lebanese players and the threats faced back home (unexploded cluster bombs on normal streets are already taking their toll. No doubt the Israelis mined the shit out of whatever ground they occupied and knew they'd be giving back).
You say I cant assume, yet I've studied psychology & philosophy for over 16 years - I know damn well aside from any other reaction, that any one of those players who cares a damn about any family or relatives they may have living in harms way (or if they dont, have especially strong homeland ties, as opposed to long being Americanised and have a weaker National patriotism), are going to have concern for those people, a concern thats present and ongoing
and as such takes up what ever amount of conscious energy it will, energy that therefore cant be spent preparing for an entertainment fixture, because we as humans have only so much conscious/emotional energy to spend on any given day.
The point of this thread was to ask how good are Venezuela to take advantage of any lack of focus or energy the Lebanese will exhibit in this tournament. The Venezuelan ml has already dropped 3 cents at 1 of my books since I started this thread. I dont think anybody backing such low odds (now -380) would not know the result related in this thread already between these 2 teams leading up to this tourney. And as BG said, the spread isnt in keeping with that result.
my next question is, was that warm-up game before or after the hostilities started?
