The ACL2 draw is upon us. I took it quite literally in the image for this article.
It is an exciting time that some of us Sailors fans have been saving up our annual leave for. The ACL2 draw brings with it the glamour of an overseas tie in places as varied as Sydney, Manila, Zhejiang, and Hiroshima. The allure of a continental match doesn’t just bring with it a small dose of national pride, it also allows us to travel and experience different cultures, as can be seen from our previous trips to South Korea and Hong Kong, to name two examples.
So who are we likely to draw? Should we be hoping to be saying Konnichiwa to friendly Japanese strangers, or are we much more likely to be saying sawadeekhrap? We answer that question in this article.
What the Math Appears to Be
Looking at the pots like that, it would seem that for any given team in Pot 1, Pot 2, and Pot 4, we have a 25% chance of drawing any of them, and a 0% chance of drawing anyone from Pot 3.
However, there are some qualifiers that change the probability a little.
Country Protection
Now, let’s get the obvious out of the way, country protection rules means that we cannot draw Tampines Rovers in Pot 4. So that means automatically, on the surface it looks like the probability of drawing any of the Pot 4 teams goes from 25% to 33%, with Tampines out of the picture as we cannot draw them.
However, there are still some qualifiers to talk about – still related to country protection.
Given that LCS is in a Pot with Muangthong United, Kaya Iloilo and Lee Man, it also makes it more likely that we will draw Dynamic Herb Cebu or Eastern United from Pot 4, as compared to our chances of drawing Persib Bandung. I’ll try my best to explain this, but this is because we already have a team from HK and Philippines in our Pot. Thus, it is more likely that if another group has drawn Lee Man from Pot 3 for example, it cannot draw Eastern, thus increasing the chance for Eastern to be in other groups containing the Sailors.
Country protection also comes to the fore when you notice that each of Pot 1, 2, and 3 have a Thai team. It makes it highly likely that we will draw a Thai team, so fans of Tom Yam and cheap massages, rejoice!
S.O.S (A Call for Help, not the Outdated Tournament that We Somehow Still Participate In)
Now, if you, like me, didn’t feel that all that made a lot of sense, then you just have to trust the code drawn up by one of my friends, Raghu, who will probably kill me for saying this, but he is a Research Fellow at the University of Oxford Department of Physics. He is probably much better at me at all these science-y, math-y stuff.
Do check him out if you are interested in his papers such as “An elementary quantum network of entangled optical atomic clocks” and “Quantum amplification of mechanical oscillator motion“.
So anyway, he spent an hour writing some code for me, and we thus have the probability table you see below of us drawing any of the opponents from each Pot.
The Probability Table
Putting all the assumptions and rules together, this is how likely we are to draw each opponent from each Pot.
As you can see, our chances of meeting a Thai opponent are very high, while a trip to Indonesia for Pot 4 looks less likely than a trip to Cebu or Hong Kong.
Conclusion
Probability is one thing, but where’s the fun in following the science all the time?
Footyrankings Draw Simulator – this is the link where you can have some fun simulating over and over again who we are likely to meet.
I tried it and got this abomination –
Please, God, no. That would make it Shopee Cup x 2 for us this year. Let’s hope the draw brings us at least one Japanese/Korean/Australian team!
Written by Eddy Hirono
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