Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaagh! Why do I waste my time? I've spent two days trying to get it across that luck is just that -- luck, fortune, something that happens out of anyone's control or intention. Every game of football is full of it, good and bad depending on what ensues and for whom. What Gary Player is saying is precisely that you do NOT "make your own luck". Luck doesn't follow the better players around; it does not distinguish one player from another, or one team from another. It is random in its occurrence; it is a coincidental, unintended, uncontrolled happening. What you CAN do (football-wise) is (as Gary Player implies) perfect your skills, maximise your efficiency, organise your defence, get yourself in top fitness, practice your routines at corners and set pieces etc. etc. so that the scope for fortune to intervene is reduced as much as possible. A top class snooker player doesn't get a lucky richochet more frequently than a poor player; he simply controls the balls better and pots them without relying on luck. But in football, unlike snooker or even, to a lesser extent golf, luck plays an inordinately large part in any game HOWEVER SKILLFUL THE TEAMS INVOLVED, AND HOWEVER WELL-MANAGED, COACHED, FIT, WELL-PREPARED ETC. THEY MAY BE.
"What the research into the relative contributions of skill and luck shows is that, between them, they account for roughly 85%-88% of performance over time (as opposed to in a single match)." As you probably know from other discussions, I'm very suspicious of the production of this kind of hard statistic for what are essentially qualitative decisions. Be that as it may, though, I'm personally surprised that such a large percentage is taken up by either skill or luck and so relatively small a percentage by psychological and motivational factors. Intuitively, I would have gone for the exact opposite: the skill level of most players in any division will be roughly the same, so psychological factors such as team spirit, cohesion, confidence and belief will count for more.
You're not wasting your time Robbie, I think you have got across what you mean to around 88% of us through skilled and practiced posting, with a bit of luck you will get the other 12% Bah!
Sorry Robbie, I think you are missing the point, maybe deliberately so! The whole purpose of the Gary Player reference was to point out what some people call luck, is in fact superior skill from training hard to perfect your talent!
Just to clarify then. Is it lucky when a player passes to his team mate who makes a run and the pass completes or is it a series of practiced facets from training and playing together to make an event probable? The passer, may see the same space as does the recipient but he cannot influence that he actually in that instance makes the run leave alone makes the run at the most oportune time to receive the pass. And thats not even considering that a defender might read his intensions or might not. Yes a more skillfull defender (Or well prepared, video highlights of passer/recipient interactions) is more likely to see the danger and intercept but is it down to luck that he doesn't intercept? Or is it in the skill of the passerwho realisses that if his intended recipient makes the run he expects him to make and he plays the pass with the right weight with an estimated uncertainty of pace and trueness of ball travel to guestimated recipient position ~15%, that the defender cannot intercept and the pass will complete. Or is he again getting lucky because his mate ran where he thought he would? Bah!
Yes, I do appreciate that that's what GP meant, as I intended my post to make clear. The bit in your post that made me despair was "If you're brimming with (confidence and spirit) luck follows you around". It doesn't follow anyone around due to anything about them; bad luck isn't a disease you can innoculate against, and good luck isn't a blessing you can earn in some way!
I think it's very hard for human beings to see luck as a random force in the way you mean, Robbie. Even people who intellectually sign up to the idea still tend to carry a metaphorical rabbit's foot around with them in terms of their daily lives. When most people talk about 'luck', I think they do see it as some kind of power that can be cajoled or attracted or entreated (or in the case of bad luck, warded off). And football fans are the worst. I have all kinds of rituals when I'm watching a game. This mindset seems to go with being human. More generally, your contributions on this thread seem to assume that a realist/materialist view of the world is obviously correct and sensible and that anything else is necessarily some kind of magical thinking. For example, I imagine that the concept of a 'jinx' is a fault in logic to you, something that can never exist in reality but only in the human mind. I'm not so sure. There are more things in heaven and earth and all that.
@vietnam canary More things in heaven and earth than reason and logic? Indeed there are, there's carrabuh for a start! And is there anyone more jinxed than poor Chris Hughton? But you've given me an idea for a new online business selling fake fur rabbit's feet in football club colours. Given how right you are about the illogical nature of things and the lack of reason displayed by football fans in particular, I will be an internet millionaire in no time at all. Added to which, now that you have convinced me totally that I am wasting my time uselessly on here, it will give me something more constructive to do.
I'll have a couple when you're in production Robbie, they will go nicely with my lucky NCFC horse-shoe
Actually I think it might be confession time here, I know it's a load of mumbo-jumbo and that superstitions and good luck charms are a man-made concept with absolutely no proof of working or having any effect at all, however I am pretty superstitious myself - it's probably the underlying, deep rooted OCD in me I'm not nuts (well, I'll perhaps leave you to argue that one), but I do find myself saluting magpies, avoiding three drain-covers and you won't catch me walking under any ladders. I used to be worse, I had a thing years ago when if I saw an ambulance (or even see the word written down) I'd have to pinch myself, and the weirdest one was if I saw a Royal Mail van I had to touch something red, but if I managed to touch a post box within ten seconds I'd be immune for the day. I'm glad I kicked that one in to touch years ago! Regarding match day rituals, all I do is don my lucky pair of pants. I had a pair from the League One season all the way up the end of last year, but they've taken quite a battering so recently for my birthday I received a couple of new pairs from the club shop. I wore the white ones for the first time for the Man City game - so they were quickly back in the drawer, and the black ones got their first outing last Saturday. I think I'll stick with those now for the rest of the season
It used to be said that, if you wanted a secure income for life, become a baker. The advice I'd give any youngster now is to train as a psychiatrist. To coin a phrase "God help us!"
Apologies vietnam; missed this one! The key phrase here is "count for more". What the stats imply is that success/failure in football is a matter of small margins. Rather as in, say, cycling or F1, if you can gain a miniscule advantage within the rules by ingenious design of your helmet or tyre change routines, it can make the difference between winning and coming second, so factors such as confidence, togetherness, team spirit, motivation, managerial nous, etc., which together don't account for that much compared to skill and fortune, can nevertheless make that crucial difference. People think of the difference money makes as chiefly a matter of player skill and managerial quality, but it goes way beyond that -- facilities, affording the best in fitness and medical care, providing players with the best support you can (e.g. assisting foreign players to integrate), and so on. This all means that, for a club like ours, the things that, in a sense money can't buy (not quite true even then), do indeed "count for more". All in all, I think people grossly underestimate the size of the task facing the manager of clubs such as ours. Slating Tony Pulis is easy enough, but he worked a miracle every year for Stoke. Likewise Martinez at Wigan (who is lauded instead of slated purely on grounds of style). Incidentally, analysis shows that Martinez' success at Wigan was largely due to his creating a team which specialised in scoring goals from free kicks and from distance (which might come as rather a surprise to carrabuh among others). Wigan under Martinez, for all they "played proper football", scored very few goals from open play compared to the average; most of those were scored on fast counter attack, and predominantly from outside the box (Rodallega and N'Zogbia in particular excelled in scoring from distance). They were consistently bottom of the table for goals scored from inside the penalty area, and scored more than four times as many goals from free kicks as the average. Winning and converting free kicks just outside the box was the Martinez equivalent of Pulis's scoring from knock downs from Delap's long throws.
Interesting stats about Martinez's Wigan. And they probably make us modify our views of that team. But they don't prove that Wigan were just as functional as Pulis's Stoke. If someone offered to pay for me to go and watch one of the two sides, I know who I'd choose. I think in football stats can be a good corrective to received wisdom, but there are so many issues regarding how they are conceptualised and then collected that they can rarely be anything more.
We'd all agree that we'd rather watch Martinez's Wigan than Pulis's Stoke. The word 'functional' doesn't quite fit what I was saying precisely because of its negative connotations with reguard to style. My point was that, because of the financial handicaps faced by those two clubs, both Pulis and Martinez had to find a different way of competing in the EPL. To quote Sinatra, each did it 'their way'. The other point I was making implicitly is that you could say the same about Norwich under Lambert. But in all three cases the strategies were not adequate for the long term. CH's brief is to make us a fixture in the EPL, and that requires becoming competitive in a more mainstream and hence sustainable fashion.
