Premier League, Caledonian Stadium. It hardly needs saying, of course, but Aberdeen enter this match whilst sitting, as ever, in 9th place in the league. Relegation remains tantalisingly out of reach. Anyway, the midweek recruitment of Jocky Scott as first team coach has given the management team at Aberdeen a combined age of 201, according to the youthfully-driven BBC. With zeitgeisty credentials to maintain, the corporation would have been remiss had it failed to slyly marvel at the combined years of these three men (Brown, Knox and Scott), whilst failing to tally their combined levels of experience. "Craig identified Jocky and we are delighted to have him on board," said chief executive Duncan Fraser. That Brown, 89, was still able to recognise Scott augurs well for their working relationship, of course, and must surely stop all sneering in its tracks. Useful BBC fact: Scott has spent three terms in charge of Dundee. Is that a good thing? I’m not entirely sure. I think it’s maybe a wee bit like someone saying: “stopping smoking is easy, I’ve done it loads of times.” We’ll see. Inverness Caledonian Thistle…..meh. My least favourite team in Scotland. Ever. We need to hurt them, badly, and I don’t care how we go about it. Nial McGinn is back in the squad, praise be, whilst Naysmith and Milsom (surprise, surprise) are out. I start to wonder if Milsom is ever really in. Prediction: Inverness CT 0 Aberdeen 2 Wish List: St Mirren and Hearts to draw; St Johnstone and Celtic to draw; Hibs and Kilmarnock to draw; Dundee to beat Motherwell. It’s not a lot to ask.
The teams: Inverness CT: Esson, Raven, Shinnie, Warren, Meekings, Blackman, Tudur-Jones, Draper, Shinnie, Foran, Doran Aberdeen: Langfield, Jack, Anderson, Considine, Reynolds, Rae, Hayes, Hughes, Fraser, Vernon, Magennis (McGinn starts on the bench - ready to come on after 63 minutes to make the decisive contribution.) Still going with 2-0. Edit: 22 minutes gone, Aberdeen yet to have a shot on goal. Playing it safe. That's fine. 42% of the possession. 3 corners. Edit: 32 minutes gone and still no shot on goal from Aberdeen. We've now had 5 (five) corners, though. Edit: 42 minutes gone and still no shot on goal from Aberdeen. Our possession is creeping upwards, however (47%), and we've now had a world record-breaking 8 corners. Class act. Edit: Half-time, 0-0. But we've now had one shot at goal and it was on target, no less. Everything is going to plan. Correction: the shot wasn't on target. But still. Second-half underway.....
Equaliser! 1-1. Smith. Thank Jesus for that. (McGinn came on in the 73rd minute.) Going for the winner now...... Edit: 4 minutes of added time to play. Edit: Full-time, 1-1. Scott Must Go. On the plus side, we recovered and remain exceptionally hard to beat (only Celtic have done so this season) and find ourselves up to 7th, a manageable five points short of the leaders, Motherwell. Cameron Smith: hero.
And here he is scoring his first ever goal for Aberdeen yesterday: please log in to view this image He'd been on the pitch for about a minute. For a 17-year-old, this maybe suggests an impressive ability to read a game and intuitively get himself into the right positions. Having come on as a substitute against St Mirren a couple of weeks ago, he very quickly rattled the bar from a similar sort of position and was a mere fraction away from scoring. According to the BBC, Smith's parents missed his goal yesterday as they had chosen to go and watch his brother, Andrew, strut his stuff in the Highland League. "They will be gutted they were not here but delighted that I have scored," the lithe youngster with energetic thighs seductively suggested. Craig Brown? "The first half was our worst performance of the season, but I told them at half-time they had to go out and do better and they were much better after the break." Really? Is this how easy managing a football team is? The players trundle disconsolately into the dressing-room at half-time and the manager says "do better"? This isn't a criticism of Craig Brown - a man I quite like and admire - it's more a complaint against the rigidly bland and faintly insulting bullshit that the sporting press may foist upon the weary punters. What do any of us learn from these words? In what sensible way is football illuminated by the publication of such remarks? It wears me down.
I had a conversation the other day about how the results of some games involve quite a bit of random luck and almost no one seems to care or take notice of it. An example is we've all watched the games where our team battered a lowly team, hit the crossbar 5 times, but ultimately failed to win the game - and were universally scorned for their inept display. Now take the randomness of those strikes that hit the crossbar, if a single footballer had of moved his leg a fraction differently or a gust of wind was blowing in a different direction that ball would have been below the crossbar, a goal scored, the game won - and our team universally praised for it's winning tenacity. The end result is all that matters - the possession and the shots on target and the balls that hit the woodwork and the legit goal that was ruled offside are irrelevant in the end. You are praised or scorned as a team for the result, and the manager can be elevated to tactical genius for that random bit of luck with the media looking for anything that happened during the game to quantify the cliched pigeon hole they want to put him in - maybe it was the half time team talk, or the substitution, or the change in formation... or maybe that better football players are more likely to score against worse football players over a big enough sample period - and the team's inability to score more goals over a smaller given period was a result of random bad luck, just as their ability to snatch a winning goal in the last minute might be a revert to the mean.
Hello, I hope you had a miraculously good weekend. That was all nicely said and I can’t really take issue with any of it, unfortunately, and it hints at a (usefully) calculating mind. I briefly considered complaining mildly at the notion that “the end result is all that matters” – I find it slightly too brutal – but recognise that it may actually be true, technically speaking (and so far as league tables and progression in cups will ever be concerned). Aberdeen have had three home games in the Premier League this season, all of which ended 0-0. If I quell those nagging doubts that the concept of “luck” may exist at all, then it might justifiably be said that they were very, very unlucky not to win all of these games (most especially against Ross County and St Mirren). And had they won all of these games, of course, and the chances created (and missed) were emphatically sufficient to do so, then they’d be sitting at the top of the league right now, crowds would be rising and the papers would be filled with “journalists” prematurely speculating all over their fingers that this might just be Aberdeen’s year. Craig Brown would be hailed as a visionary. But we didn’t win any of those games and the margins are excruciatingly thin and I’m sometimes left wondering at the point of football managers at all (specifically throughout the course of a match). I mean, how does one legislate for a team repeatedly missing gilt-edged chances, for example? Telling them to "do better" feels somehow insufficient in the face of such maliciously unhelpful rolls of the cosmic dice.
Actually I was taking issue with 'The end result is all that matters' - implying that's what almost everyone seems to be base their post-match analyses on - wrongly. Although I am coming at this from a position of judging the quality of two sporting teams vs each other - in terms of sporting success I suppose it's quite true. (I really need to take some sort of writing class, the amount of times I have to post twice to articulate what I really meant). I put a lot of effort into finding statistically significant and insignificant results. If I have watched a team absolutely batter another team, but through the random luck of crossbars or calamitous goal keeping errors not win the game then it indicates that result may not be a true indicator, as it were, of how a team may perform next time out. I once worked for one of the world's biggest bookmakers where they had a single odds compiler make odds for over 12 leagues - so you can imagine the resources the much smaller companies are able to allocate to these tasks (like my current company, who have just about enough resources to copy and paste from my last company). This guy also did the odds for the Scottish leagues... and absolutely hated Scottish football. In making up the odds for the SPL teams every week he basically took the league position, recent results, league positions in the previous season and has a rather simple formula to pump out the odds. He had far too much work to do and far too little interest to look into the individual performance of the teams recently, rather than the overall result. Knowing the variables that goes into this odd pumping machine I know that if any of those could be considered wrong, for instance Aberdeen recently humping teams but failing to win, then I may think that he has too harshly punished Aberdeen in their probabilities to win their next game. Of course there are lots of other variables including team news that could effect this - but considering the amount of effort even the largest organisations put into research, if you put 30 mins into studying the form closer you are literally putting more effort than any bookmaker on the planet has done. Anyway in terms of whether or not managers are important; I do believe there are some top class managers out there who can make players perform slightly better on average, or who have a neck for organising their entire operation to it's maximum efficiency. But I think Gordon Strachan was once quoted as saying something like, very roughly: "Good footballers win games, if you have better footballers on the pitch then you win more games - the hard part is trying to find good footballers". You can almost imagine all the other football managers shaking their fist at Gordon for giving up their managerial secrets of success, Penn and Teller style. Per the script this calls for a book recommendation The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Drunkards-Walk-Randomness-Rules/dp/0713999225. I haven't read it in a few years but I remember thoroughly enjoying it at the time and believe it goes into detail on how we sometimes wrongly place significance on the results of randomness - and I think it also nods it's hat towards how the laws of averages state that some sporting managers can be much more successful than others through nothing more than random chance alone (I think it mentions this, I was going through a popular science stint at the time and may have read that somewhere else, like Freakonomics).
Aha, no worries, I get you now. The fault may have lain in a careless reading, as opposed to a careless writing. Right so, I (momentarily) forgot that you were in the betting business, sorry. I’ll take a guess that this sharpens up your mind in other aspects of life; this constant assessing of the odds and weighing up of the (seeming) imponderables. Anything and everything to do with betting lies outwith my ken, unfortunately, and I lack the head/particular brand of intellect for it. I’ve tried to understand what 11/8 may mean, for example, but find myself entirely ill-suited to the task. I can just about understand 10/1, but everything else eludes me – and I have no idea how to place a bet. I’m very surprised to hear that bookmakers may be less than diligent in compiling their odds, however. Very surprised. I had taken it as a given that all bookmakers would pore over the statistics of any given match in order to identify (developing and form-pointing) trends and to protect themselves from nasty surprises and the attendant risk of a potential beating. It hadn’t really occurred to me that this would, quite naturally, be all but impossible. Maybe I should place a bet somewhere, after all. I may need to rid myself of a disastrously limiting streak of puritanism (small P) first, right enough, and embrace a more catholic (small C) approach. These glimpses of the way your mind might work, Administrator, may invite partial comparisons with Donald Rumsfeld: There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know. He was pilloried in the press for this statement, of course, but I really liked it, welcoming the relentless procession of (cagey) logic. I think I would probably take this way of thinking towards any gamble/bet I might ever consider, although perhaps leading to a wallet-closing standstill. Good quote from Gordon Strachan – and probably fairly hard to argue against, really, although such demystification of an imagined managerial alchemy might disappoint those of us looking for something that might impress and inspire. You’re right, though, in that some managers do appear to possess an indefinable something or other that transmits itself to those in their charge. (I never understand how the inarticulate managers – and they are legion – manage to get their message across. But that’s another thing altogether.) Spooky - random, even – but I bought that book in a second-hand shop a couple of weeks ago, as well as a book called Does God Play Dice?: The New Mathematics of Chaos. (Both books cost 50 cents each – bargain – and they are 32nd and 33rd, respectively, on my shelf of shame - The Giant Shelf of Unread Books – and so I’m doubtful I’ll get to read them until some time towards the end of the year.) I loved the look of The Drunkard’s Walk, however. I can’t really get enough of that sort of thing and look forward to tearing though it. (Is there really such a thing as the law of averages? Can such a thing be properly said to exist? Meltdown.....)
Yeah there is a bit of a mythology around the career path I rather randomly stumbled upon. It does surprise some that like almost every other industry there is a production line of product (odds compilation) going through recognised and standarised procedures of raw material input (sporting variables) into a machine. As organisers of big business and big staff numbers do, they've simplified the procedure hoping the worst and best efforts average themselves someway towards the middle over a big enough sample. As general humans do while looking in on another's industry, they assume that there is something superior or 'expert' around those engaged in an enterprise they have limited personal experience with - rather than recognising that for most 'a job is a job' and that truly clever humans are actually in quite short supply in almost every industry. In saying this if you have no experience of odds then you're probably wise to stay away from them - unless you're willing to put extended and considerable effort in, at which point it becomes easy to the point where you're single greatest hardship is finding a bookmaker who has not yet barred you from betting with them - because you are the top end of the average and they are only interested in the median and low end. You are right though that a constant weighing up of probabilities changes your view on very normal every day things. I could actually talk about this particular subject for hours since my career niche has rather randomly drifted towards being a programmatic modeler of player behaviour in sports (a lot of game theory)... though given our limited time on Earth I probably need to not get into any detail of how this works for now. I do think though I could actually write a book on it some day, I easily have about 4 or 5 chapters ready to go - but I'll probably need to wait a while for another 8 chapters to reveal themselves, otherwise I'd be one of those irritating authors who surround a few good central ideas with waffle - plus I haven't figured out how to write yet. I made some weird facial expressions at my first effort at reading this before eventually conceding it makes a lot of sense. I wouldn't have been a big price that you've encountered that book, in fact my two-second-pre-weighing-up of the situation probably put you at a rather lazy and rough 50% chance of having read or come across that book before (since it's a very highly rated and recently well sold non-fiction book, and there actually isn't that much of an endless supply of such books) - but rather than waste three written lines asking had you read something, I thought it may be more comfortable for you to let me know - and also the psychopathic manipulative part of myself knew it would lead to one of those 'we have something in common' moments within your good self... See you like me more now because I led you to believe that you, of your own free will, have randomly established a shared interest with me...
Do you mean that you rather randomly stumbled into the betting industry in the first place and then, once you were there, you rather randomly stumbled into being a “programmatic modeler of player behaviour”? (I’m not going to pretend that I fully understand what that means, although I think I may get the most basic gist of it.) Or did you randomly stumble into the business as a programmer from the outset, with these incidental (programming) skills already in place? And if these skills were already in place, how did you achieve them? Are you happy there? Can you imagine doing something completely different? Did you ever/always have a plan (save for getting rich, you despicable lout), or were you aimlessly drifting for a part of your life? I seem to remember reading somewhere that you left school early and worked in a burger van, so something radical appears to have changed along the way. And wait: you mean to say that bookmakers can bar people from betting with them for no other reason than they (particular punters) just happen to be good? How on earth is that even legal, never mind fair? You learn something new every day….. Definitely write a book. Your writing is absolutely fine – please don’t be so mean to yourself, honey, please, it really hurts me – and may even be seen to be streets ahead of some people who, almost unbelievably, get away with doing it for a living. I know what you mean about people who write books around an originally good idea and then clearly have nothing further of interest to add to it. This can leave me feeling hollowed out, irritated (or maybe “frustrated” is a better word) and cheated. But even if you don’t think you have enough chapters to complete the thing presently, there’s surely no harm in writing out the chapters you already have (in your head). If nothing else, it’ll give you a lot less to do when it comes to writing the thing in earnest. I say go for it. Jesus. If you don't write a book, maybe you could do one of those hypnotism shows where you convince girls to get down to their bras and stuff. Or become a psychologist, perhaps, beadily observing human behaviours whilst waiting for an opening to tell some dribbler that their healing must come from within - but that'll be £300, in the meantime, please.
You have fitted a lot of big questions into a few lines and now I'm going to feel like a bit of an ear basher in the effort I put in to answer them satisfactorily. Yeah I'd guess there was a certain amount of randomness involved in me ending up in the gambling industry. The true story is a rather un-glamorous one of teenage me wandering into a job center in Belfast and seeing an advert for a 'Data Input Clerk' in the head office of one of the local betting shop chains. I left full time education at 16 only partly from free choice. I wasn't stupid (neither was I a particularly clever kid) but I hated the whole subservient student and dominant teacher hierarchy. In fact I hated it so much I became a little bastardly to all those above me in the structure, and towards the end I didn't bother to turn up most of the time. On the morning of the first day of GCSE tests I had my head of year calling to my house to drag me to school to actually take the tests. Despite my truancy and engagement in general petulant bawbaggery I ended up passing all of the tests comfortably with A-C grades (strangely enough I got a C in English literature having never read any of the books which were quizzed on the test!?). So I ended up with grades which on paper were well above good enough to get back into that school for A-Levels, but unsurprisingly my school rejected my application without much need of an explanation. As much as I can put a lot of it down to hating authority (or rather omnipotent authority) I was an extremely sociable adolescent and quite a lot of my disinterest in school was probably due to the stinking hangovers around the times I was supposed to be learning. At that stage of my development I also went through various part time jobs (in fact I've never been out of paid employment for more than a few weeks since I got my first part time job in KFC when I was 14) which tended to much more immediately profitable than the education lark. I actually found working life much preferable to school life - in general people treated you as an adult and usually with mutual respect. In saying this if there was one great thing that came out of that extremely competitive and irritatingly oppressive Grammar School education it was the relief I felt when I entered the free choices of real employment - and the fact that the average capabilities of my peers suddenly dropped to leave me in a somewhat unexpected position of appearing to be quite clever in comparison. So yes in between leaving school and wandering into that job center I worked in a burger van outside a night club, as a worker that is where I first met my darling customer wife (a lady who has obvious skill in picking out the flowers among the burgervan weeds). I was downplaying this a bit as at 17 years old I actually owned that burger van - I bought it with the money I had made from selling a website I had built on ebay for the pricely sum of two thousand and five hundred pounds (which was around 1,000 times my hourly £2.15 KFC wage and felt quite considerable at the time). My skills in computers which had led to the sale were something I had built through nothing but personal 'trial and errorish' experience in the fews hours I dedicated a week to the task - which of my own free and self educating will had led me into very basic computer programming. Incidentally, the website that I sold was quite a popular instruction guide on how to roll around 60 various types of Joints I also happened to do quite a few other jobs - I worked in Burger King, I cleaned cars full time for a while and I tarmacked roads (what discerning Irishman hasn't tarmacked a drive or two?). The last tarmacking job surprisingly enough was one that I was actually quite contented with for a while - I still use it to this day to try explain the chemical reactions inside the brain that can very possibly decide how happy or content we are in life. To give a typical day tarmacking: I'd wake up at 5.30am, be ready for after 6am and be on the roads for 7am walking up and down with wheelbarrows doing my thing. By 4pm I'd be in the pub - and by god that first pint was gorgeous, immense and well deserved. By 5.30pm I'd be home with the dinner on the table, I'd be starving and the food would be wolfed down. At 8pm I'd be lying tired on the sofa watching something I probably couldn't bear to watch now, like Fawlty Towers, actually enjoying it. By 10pm I'd be in bed and I'd sleep like a baby. All because my body felt like it had done a days work. Compare it to these days where I spend the entire day on my arse, stressing and thinking and going through numbers and doing conference calls - and then being irritatingly active by the time I get home at 7pm. Screw Fawlty Towers, I need a bigger hit at 8pm ANYWAY the reason I ended up wandering into that job center a few years later was not because I wanted a job - I was doing ok in my amateur entrepreneurial efforts - it was because my lovely 16 year old girlfriend had become pregnant - and I now needed to do adult things, like gain full time employment so that I may build a credit record to apply for a mortgage to buy a house and actually become an adult. In true Psycho style... I'll get the rest later.
You mean thereâs more? FFS, itâs already as long as a Bulgarian novella, replete with stark determinations and a tilt against authority and the initially tenderising triumph of young love against the odds. Iâve never read a Bulgarian novella, true, although Iâm sure they must exist, but I like to think the younger you would slot comfortably into my guess at what they might be like. Unfortunately, youâre very likely to hit the bottle quite soon and become a loan-shark in a neighbourhood in which you were once regarded fondly as the success story. And your wife? Forget about it. âPlease for to stop with heeting me, Mikhail Reidorovich, you are no longer the man I once knewed,â sheâll sob wildly every night as you set about the business of whipping her ribs after another day spent on the vodka. This will all take place against a backdrop of suffocating censorship, subversive street theatre and civil war. You need to sort your **** out, to be honest. No worries, I like stuff like this. Keep it coming and Iâll look forward to responding (properly, I mean) once you're done.
Don't worry Psycho, I sense you are a deeply private person and it will hurt you a lot more when I eventually fire off my horrendously invasive questions about the development of your life - and you'll feel guilty enough about the long winded and detailed answers I gave to have to answer them too. So, yeah, I ended up in betting through a number of quite obscure and seemingly random variables coalescing into a career path. I worked for around three years in Belfast before, by happy chance, getting the opportunity to move upwards and onwards to seek my fortune in Malta (which happens to be the biggest hub for online gambling in Europe). I loved Malta, I still love Malta, I'm actually currently pretty homesick for Malta. I matured and made good friends, friends for life, friends from all sorts of weird and wonderful backgrounds and countries who had gravitated as emigrants towards the island. We were immigrant buddies and we all had our tales to tell which made for much more interesting dinner parties and pub sessions that what I was used to from back home - I don't know if I have mentioned this already, but I loved my time in Malta. (Sinbad the Sailor finished not so long ago on Sky1, which is filmed in Malta, and making me nostalgic) Well, by unhappy chance, the company I worked in for four years in Malta collapsed (you evidently do hear of a poor bookie) just as I had finished investing every penny I had in buying a house there, leaving me financially desperate for work, anywhere. I had built a decent CV though and had the quite unique mixture of being competent in Bookmaking and Information Technology. If I remember correctly I ended up getting four (or five) proper contract offers at the time. They were all very different jobs but the most enticing and highly paid position was based in Sydney, Australia. After a horrendously difficult weighing up of the situation and the positions I ended up taking (at almost half the Sydney wage - I mention this because I come across as a money grabber, for some reason ) was in a big multinational firm in Guernsey, working as a programmatic derivative modeler of sports. Long story short I built programs and models which automatically worked out the percentage chances of things happening in a sport - for instance Which team is going to get the next Throw In while the game is actually taking place, in real time. It fitted my background perfectly, and was by my own reckoning the position that would actually teach me the most - even if it was on a tiny boring island for not a lot of money. I did indeed learn a lot of new things and I made many more friends (with only a little less interesting tales) but I judged the island by the standards of happiness I had set myself in Malta. The island was expensive to live, as an immigrant I was legally excluded from living in all but the most horrendously expensive properties which meant I had to house share and keep my family offshore. I learned a lot of things in that position and I enjoyed the job but the living situation made it impossible in the end - which forced me to seek out the 4th island home of my life. So... you had inquired how I went from burger van to sports modeler and had I a preorganised plan in doing so - which led me on a convoluted semi-autobiographical path and has made me all self conscious over talking about myself too much... if this was a first date I'd be in trouble. The most difficult question I feel you have asked though is whether I am happy in what I am doing or ever thought of doing something else; At various times in the past I've been positively smug about what I do for a living (I was after all 21 years old living on a Mediterranean island being paid very well to watch sport all day) but more recently it has moved somewhere closer towards not being sure. Secluding myself four nights a week on empty wet islands has not helped my short term sense of achievement it must be said... I miss fun and family. In terms of having considered other career paths, before taking the Isle of Man position I seen an advertisement looking for, roughly, a 'C# .NET Developer with experience in producing algorithms to find patterns in large datasets' - it was a position in the Astronomy department of Queens University Belfast, trying to sift through data from the Kepler Space Telescope in order to monitor gravitational wobbles around distant star systems to find exo-planets. I seen the position just as I was crossing the t's on my contract to go to the Isle of Man - and I think I would have loved that job. I'm pretty certain that going for it in Belfast as well there is not going to be a huge amount of individuals with genuine experience in doing such things, who were willing to accept such a wage, and who were actually astronomy buffs. In the end though after a conversation or two with the missus I didn't even try to go for it, although I really seriously considered it - it would have been a huge pay cut, I had been offered a really senior position on the IOM, and it would have meant settling down in Belfast again, probably forever (I'm a self loather, considering Belfast to be one of the worst places to even visit in the British Isles). But I think I would have really enjoyed it, and I think it would have filled that hole which is dug by the desire to achieve something in life - other than the soulless accumulation of wealth. Anyway I hope that answers most of your quick-fire questions, I'll be back with some revenge questions about your life and interests - I'm thinking something like; who is your favourite author and what are some of their best pieces of writing? (I am not actually that interested in the answer, but I reckon your mind would force you to put more effort in than I just did to answer such a question )
