International Caps Part 1

(in part 2, I'll outline my best guess at the top five most capped Ireland players in the open and women's divisions. In this part, I discuss how I got there).

The discussion that brought this up
I was having a discussion with some of the other Dublin players at tour 2 last weekend about caps. Wouldn't it be nice to have international 'caps' like in other sports.

Apparently, there are (or were) physical 'caps' (as in hats) given to players in international fixtures in other sports. See the Wikipedia article about it.

I think some of the Ireland players on Dublin Ultimate want some new headgear. Maybe it would be a nice way to recognise our 'capped' players and our 'most capped' players.

A few questions arose from this discussion.

Would buying hats for this be a total waste of time and money?
I should say that those advocating the purchase of head coverings weren't suggesting a new hat be given to players for each game, but just for their first international appearance and possibly milestones after that (like maybe just for your 1st cap, your 50th cap, and your 100th cap you'd get some real head insulation). I'm still unconvinced on that one; if you want a national team souvenir, keep your jersey (swap a spare one if you want to trade for another jersey). Buying more stuff is unnecessary.

Which games should count as 'full internationals' for the purposes of counting caps?
Aside from literal caps, it might be nice to have a list of all of our capped players and our all-time most capped players. Which brings me to question 1; which games should count? Not all international games are WFDF sanctioned but maybe this should be the deciding factor? (For instance the 8 Nations tournament last year wasn't sanctioned by WFDF). But if it's an honest to goodness national team playing another national team, then I think this should count as a full international match. The consensus we reached was that for non WFDF sanctioned competition, games against other full national teams should count, whereas games against 'dream teams' or club teams representing their nation at the likes of the 8 nations shouldn't. And of course, to get a 'cap' for a game, you have to play at some stage in that game (injuries are unfortunate, that's the way of sports).

Beach ultimate came up in this conversation too, something we thought should be treated as a different sport altogether for this. So for now, I'm not going to look at beach ultimate at all.

Anyway, such a system would mean it's difficult to count caps accurately, since it’s not easy to know if every player played every game. Considering this aspect of our sport, should we change the system? We could say there’s a cap for each player for each game the team plays (so the whole team gets like 10 caps for the tournament)? Or just one cap per tournament rather than per game, which would reflect the fact that players are selected to the squad just once for each tournament.

I think some of us have a deep longing to be like other sports. So while a one cap per tournament system might make more sense for ultimate, and even though I could look up the national teams section of the Irish ultimate website and easily count up caps and see who has represented Ireland at the most tournaments, it just doesn't seem as interesting. Imagine a list of most capped players where the biggest number is 4 or 5.

What about non-selected teams?
This was a question on which I don't think we agreed. We were talking about occasions where, through lack of there being very many interested players; everyone that's willing to go to a particular tournament gets on the  national team. Should these players be honoured with caps? Well, I think so! If you play in a full international game representing your country, then that's a cap. What's more, the logistics of awarding caps would get even more difficult, by complicating things like this.

The archive of international games
Anyway, the archive of international games, that has recently been publicised on various mailing lists basically counts international caps already. It might take a little bit of website navigation (and the site is pretty slow but he knows that) to find who's got how many Ireland caps. (It may be necessary to account for anyone appearing twice with a misspelling of their name, but it's a fantastic resource nonetheless. The creator of it uses the sort of criteria that I think is sensible, and it has the caveat that it looks at:

"games played by a team this person belonged to. This could overstate the number of games this person has really played in. (Player nominated to a team might not play in a certain game because of coaches decision, because she/he is injured or because she/he has not yet arrived to the tournament site.)"

Figuring out who played in which game really would be tough!

I do think that there are a few mistakes in the data. For instance in 8 nations open division last year, we played the Netherlands twice (and lost twice); one pool game and then again in the final. But only one game against the Netherlands is counted.

And the 8 nation’s women’s division doesn't seem to be there at all. Perhaps it’s just not up yet? Or maybe there weren't enough official national teams present for the site to count it? Looking at the teams the Irish ladies played, France and the UK are labelled as 'dream teams' (a phrase they use to refer to a non-official national team), and then club teams are listed for Belgium and the Netherlands. Only Spain and Ireland seem to be official national teams.

Anyway, I've made an attempt at making a top 5 list of most capped Irish players (see part 2: the next post on this blog). I counted one extra 8 Nations game against the Dutch for the open team (over what the national teams archive had). And I counted the one game against the Spanish for the womens team. It does seem strange (perhaps unfair) to only count 1 match from the whole tournament for the women, but I think that's how to adhere to the rules I already defined.