Debunking your football theories
“People think possession is measured by the amount of time one team has the ball, but it’s not.It’s measured by the number of passes and the percentage of time the team passes the ball to one another. That means it’s correlated to time but it’s not measured in amounts of time. Even if we agreed on the definition of possession, though, the next question is this: does it matter? Possession is something we talk a lot about but without considering under what conditions it might actually matter — teams win on 25% of possession, say, which means it doesn’t matter all the time.
“But in turn that can make it harder for fans to appreciate useful statistics. It might help to accept that statistics can be used in a descriptive way, to tell us what happened without necessarily telling us why a team won.”
Anderson and David Sally wrote The Numbers Game: Why Everything You Know About Football Is Wrong, which would explain his interest in statistics. Which doesn’t mean there’s a secret magic to them...
“There’s an idea that the numbers hold a magic formula and if a team discovers that we’ll win the Champions League. Many years ago the FA issued a manual called ‘The Winning Formula’ — the title implied that a winning formula existed in football. It was based on the idea of getting the ball into the final third and creating chances there — that this was the most efficient way to play.
“What we’ve tried to emphasise is that there’s no winning formula in football, but that there are different ways of playing and winning. Arsenal play effectively with the passing game, while Stoke overachieve by playing a more traditional game. The point is not there’s a truth in the numbers. The point is that the numbers allow you to see the game in different ways.
“What we’re trying to do with the book is to give fans a different seat in the stadium — to see things a little differently.”
Anderson admits the long-standing biases and beliefs — that you’re vulnerable to a goal immediately after scoring one yourself, that a new manager gives a team a quick spike in performance — can be hard to displace with cold hard numbers. Actually, scratch that ‘hard’ . . .
“Incredibly difficult. One of the goals of the book is to find a way to make the broader public aware of their own failings — to hold up a mirror and ask, ‘do you think this too?’
“The combination of wishful thinking and selective memory is potent enough in ordinary life, never mind sport. Scouts and managers have often grown up in the game, thinking one way as they achieve, so there’s little incentive for them to say they don’t understand something. And a person who says ‘you may have been in this game for 30 years but there’s something you’re not seeing very well’ . . . that doesn’t go over very well.”
Do yourself a favour and buy the book. And check out andersonsally.com for more on this.
I enjoy The Guardian — particularly the Review on a Saturday, when you get a chance to see what the big thinkers are reading — and I certainly enjoyed their dissection of the new embodiment of liberal guilt, the cry of ‘check your privilege’.
Briefly, this means being aware of your position relative to any issue you comment upon, so obviously if one were a multimillionaire commenting on whether or not people should pay the property tax, one would want to be aware of the financial constraints affecting other members of the population: check your privilege before commenting.
Fair enough.
There are obvious pitfalls, though. Clearly the over-zealous can go too far with this attitude and call into question anybody’s right to comment on matters they’re not uniquely qualified to hold a view on. But that’s something we can address another day.
In the last couple of weeks there’s been a good deal of comment in sports circles here about declining GAA attendances and what can be done to halt the slide in the numbers of people going to games.
It’s true that people are not attending games in the vast droves we saw around the turn of the century, and what’s common to many analyses of this decline is a focus on the structures of the football and hurling championships.
What hasn’t been recurring in the commentary, thankfully, is a rush to condemn people for being fair-weather fans, or fickle followers, of just about any other alliterative condemnation you can think of.
For this observer the main issue with the slippage is the recession, plain and simple.
I met up with Ivan Dineen of Munster rugby recently, a player whose masters in economics is focusing on ticket pricing for the province’s games (you read it here last week). In our chat it was telling that he pointed out that there appeared to be a slight delay in the recession’s impact on people going to games. It took a year or two for the carnage in the economy at large to ripple through to match attendances. That seems to be true of GAA attendances too. Though the economic downturn has been with us for quite a few years now, it may be that it’s only this year that the real damage is being done, though it’s a) early in the season to be surmising and b) it’d be difficult to prove that conclusively.
Which leads me back to the starting point. It’s encouraging that commentators haven’t been bemoaning supporters for not turning up, because most of those commentators are in a position where they’re being paid to be at the games they’re attending. At a time when thousands of people genuinely don’t know how they’ll pay the mortgage, dropping €100 plus on a single day out is simply a bridge too far; if the weather of last week continues, then you have the option of a free day’s entertainment sitting in the sun.
Tempting though it might be to criticise the people who aren’t in Wexford Park, or Tullamore, or Limerick last weekend, check your privilege before you do so.
Nobody asked me, but ... the Munster championship is now so encrusted in mythology that you could forget actual games are played alongside the good-natured hosting.
Take yesterday in Limerick, where we had a reasonable facsimile of the games your grandfather spoke about, to use Ger Loughnane’s old phrase: the tar bubbling on the roads, the mingled crowds killing cider, and presumably, somewhere on a lonely street, a cardboard side in a window advertising ‘meat teas’.
Yours truly saw the ultimate in 21st-century Munster championship tradition, though, out past the Jetland. Three middle-aged men in Tipperary jerseys were slapping on the factor 50 when a couple of Limerick gents of similar vintage tried to squeeze past on the inside of the footpath.
Cue not the expected slagging, but the tube of sun cream being passed from Slievenamon to Shannonside, and a good deal of it being spread on Limerick faces (I believe ‘liberally’ is the mandatory adverb).
What Paddy Leahy and Mick Mackey would have made of it, I know not.
After the game, of course, it might not have been as cordial. Limerick turned Tipperary but it wasn’t a smash-and-grab, last-minute goal.
They worked hard all through and when the game was still live they were able to hit over nine points to Tipperary’s two after John O’Dwyer seemed to have put the visitors in the driving seat with a fine goal.
Afterwards we asked Tipp manager Eamon O’Shea if he expected a more temperate reaction than that which greeted the team’s surprise 2010 defeat to Cork in Páirc Uí Chaoimh.
O’Shea acknowledged that passions run deep about the game, but in his heart of hearts he’ll surely be hoping the home support row in behind his team on the qualifier route.
