Enough of this ****..... Yiiiiiiiiiiiiid Arrrrrrmmyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy! Off to the game. Death or Glory, boys.
It exists in physics where it is impossible to destroy. There is very little evidence that it exists in sport. It's the usual problem of people seeing patterns where there are none present. Interestingly there is an evolutionary advantage in doing that as false positives are usually less harmful than false negatives (missing seeing a tiger in the undergrowth can often be terminal, running away from a non existent tiger usually isn't). Even if it were true that winning a streak of matches made it more likely to win the next one, that doesn't give much insight in to how the tactics or team selection should be affected by the streak.
Well in sport, as in life, perhaps the word confidence should be used. If you are confident of succeeding, you are more likely to. A good run of victories breads confidence. May the force be with you.....which, of course is the rate of change of momentum
It is rather surprising but there is little statistical evidence that confidence matters. If it did there should be longer winning streaks by good teams than would occur by chance but most studies don't find that.
Statistics are not always right. Statistically the more miles one drives the more accidents one should have, but that doesn't work. Young people tend to have more accidents than say bus drivers.
Hmm. Drawing conclusions from statistics is notoriously prone to error. In your example there are all sorts of corrections you need to make to allow for the fact that inexperienced or out of practice drivers are likely to both drive fewer miles and have more accidents. Also people who drive long distances are more likely to use motorways which are safer. But no-one sane would deduce that you are less likely to have an accident by driving a longer route to the same destination. And it is that sort of inference that people make when talking about momentum. I mean if it were true both that we are more likely to win after a winning sequence and that picking Kane is likely to temporarily weaken us, isn't the right thing to do to play him before the sequence ends?
It's more about the players picking up some momentum (playing better and better as in the Dortmund game) through playing regularly in a particular system (e.g. Son and Llorente) and then having the system completely changed to accommodate the prematurely returning Kane.
Are you Kane's mum, by any chance? Son being moved from central striker to behind Kane is changing the system. Llorente was playing more minutes from the bench and starting the odd game too.
Not as good as Llorente in the air. And for some reason Son looks better alongside Llorente than he does Kane.
I have clearly watched a series of different matches to other people here. I think some people are thinking that because we were winning we were playing better without Harry. In my opinion this is just not true, we have played better (not much, but better), against both Chelsea and Arsenal than we did against Fulham and Leicester and similar to Watford and Newcastle. But these 4 teams suffered lapses in concentration that we punished the better teams don't do that. Sacking Poch and selling Harry are extreme reactions to a dip in form that I believe has been caused by our players finally hitting the wall after nearly 2 years of non stop football those 9 players who had less than 3 weeks off after the world cup are all physically and mentally knackered. I realise that most of them have had injuries and some time off (coincidence?), but being injured is not like a break/holiday for a footballer. And maybe these last 2 matches in particular show just how important Dele is in the big matches, his movement and appreciation of space has been really been missed in these last 2 games and maybe he is the glue that makes Harry and Sonny more effective in the final third.
Well said totally agree dele is the biggest miss of all the players we have had out injured his movement and attacking play is what gets the best out of the team and kane and Eriksen always seem to know without looking where he will be .It's very noticeable when he's not there and I think also that has affected Eriksen who always had an out ball to dele or due to his runs taking out defenders leaving space for kane and sonny to do the damage from an Eriksen pass.All this talk about selling kane is laughable and to be where we are in the league with all the injuries we have had is remarkable.
At the end of the day what stands out is that we haven't won a game sine Harry came back into the team. Now i'm not advocating that we get rid of him or Poch. What i said before the Burnley game was that he should be introduced from the bench and allow him to slowly get back to match-fitness without disrupting the team too much (our most in-form player, Son, has completely disappeared Since Kane's return). As for us not playing very well, i thought we showed our quality against Dortmund second half. Also, i think Harry often brings himself back into contention too quickly because he wants to win that golden boot that he got so used to receiving, else why all the fuss over Eriksen's goal against Stoke last season? For all Poch's talk of selecting Kane when Poch thought he was ready, he still brought him back too quickly and disrupted the team. We may not have always played brilliantly in Kane's absence but we were finding ways to grind out results.
