Of course luck exists in football. Goals are scored by players feet being milimetres in the right or wrong postion, the same for the players themselves. No wonder you are so critical if you think luck plays no part. It's not unusual for a team with lesser players to beat a better team. There are a number of factors in that and luck is one of them. It's Luck whether you meet a team weakened by injuries, it's luck when you meet a team stuggling with a very hard run of games. One of the major reasons for the world wide success of football is that luck plays a part making the game hard to predict. Wether you are in or out of form is a matter of luck. On and on, luck is evreywhere in football. Do you think we got to the final of the Champions league because we were the 2nd best team in Europe?
Us Saints fans have become somewhat experts on these things in recent years unfortunately. We did go down to ten men early-ish v Leicester though.
We got to the final of the champions league because Lucas Moura put in a masterclass. There was no luck in that. It was footballing brilliance from an individual. The best teams don’t consistently win by luck, they win because they have better players. Likewise the bad teams often lose because they have poorer players. Luck is an overrated word used often by losers or those enviable of successful sides.
The answer is obvious. The element of skill is to engineer more situations than the opposition where mistakes will be punished or at least costly. Yes, Chelsea were gifted two stupid penalties, but it can so easily be argued that they won them because they'd spent the bulk of the previous 15mins laying siege to our area, pinning us back inside our own half. This allowed them to push more players forward into more dangerous positions. It isn't rocket science from there to deduce how a penalty might become more likely. It wasn't "inevitable" that those exact goals would be scored against Chelsea, but if you sat 100 random people in a room and made them watch the entire game with the goals edited out, and then predict the final score, it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if 99 of them went for 3-6 to Chelsea, in which case we weren't unlucky to concede those penalties, we were relatively lucky not to lose by more! The even goes for refereeing errors. Yes, perhaps there is some truth to numerous dubious decisions going against the likes of Wolves or Forest in recent years, but this hides the reality that weaker teams will suffer more than stronger teams from a ref's error simply because the opposition is already dominating territory where that error will hurt exponentially more. We've seen similar here recently, with Vicario targeted relentlessly at corners due to his weakness in the air. We could blame that on 'luck' or we could look to reduce the likelihood of that weakness actually hurting us by working to concede fewer corners in the first place, which in turn requires us to work on patterns of defending that will channel the opposition to central areas instead.
There is nothing consistent about luck. There was no luck in our getting to the final of the CL. Wow! You really beleive we were the second best team in Europe because if luck played no part then that's what that means.
If the refereeing had been different in just three decisions...red cards for the Fulham and Chelsea players and the Arsenal goal disallowed (and whether or not you think those were right they could easily have happened) we would most likely have six extra points. That would put us 3rd, two behind Chelsea. None of those things were under Ange's or Levy's control. Would anyone be calling for them to be sacked if that's how things had turned out?
You don't need to be the second best team in all of Europe to reach the CL final. You just need to be the first or second best team out of a partly randomly selected group of 4 teams, and then the first best team (although not necessarily in both games) against 3 more teams in the KO stages. So you need to be the best team against 6 teams, not the whole continent. How is this even open to conjecture?
We got to the final because Lucas Moura was excellent. What was lucky about that? Man City are the best team in the country but are on a terrible streak. Is that bad luck? Of course it isn’t, they’re simply not playing well enough.
Probably not. They've still got things wrong, though. City have injuries and failed to strengthen correctly during the summer. They didn't replace Alvarez, didn't bring in backup for Rodri, didn't buy a left-back and failed to account for their aging squad. No matter what people think of Guardiola, that's poor management and nothing to do with luck.
Lucas Moura only played about three excellent games for Spurs. Do you think he deliberately made one of those the CL semi final?
This is speculative and based on no evidence. It is totally disingenuous to claim that most games are decided by random luck, but in the same breath claim that the opposition going down to 10 men makes a win inevitable. As we demonstrated against Fulham, them going down to 10 men didn't help. And against Galatasary, after we went down to 10 men we scored the only remaining goal of the game.
Semantically, yes. Practically - no, given that the only alternative to adjudicate which team is genuinely the best in Europe is for them to face every team in the entire continent, which is ludicrous. Even the 'luck' of the draw itself is mitigated by the seeding system and pots. We were mighty "lucky" in our maiden CL voyage under Poch yet still made a pig's ear of what was seen as an easy group.
I've never claimed that most games are decided by luck...that would be absurd. And I specifically didn't say that the six points were inevitable. I said it was most likely. That's entirely different.
And by the same token, if those red cards had been given and we'd still gone on to drop points to Chelsea and Fulham (who would've been down to 9 by FT as it happens), that would have made the calls for Ange's dismissal too loud to ignore.
Of course not. If you play brilliantly all the time you are going to win most of the points. Our problem this season is that we've played well a bit over half the time. Which I don't think is unexpected given some of the issues we've faced. Given the way we've played I agree with @remembercolinlee that most of the results have been 'deserved'. But I also think our goal distribution has been unlucky. There is no inconsistency between those two statements. To put it another way, if our goal distribution had been more normal we would likely be in an undeserved third place...
As you pointed out earlier Chelsea benefited because they attacked us heavily in the second half. I don't think that would have happened if they had had ten men. But it is all conjecture. The only point I was trying to make was that either decision was manifestly possible in each of those calls by the ref and by any definition that is luck.
