The danger of too much analysis
I have a reason for asking this question, one that goes back eight days or so to the National Hurling League final, the last big sports event I attended.
The sensory overload after that game, never mind in the middle of it, was overwhelming.
Just going onto the field in Thurles, you had the sudden shock of the smell of wet grass, the red streaks of blood against the amber on Richie Hogan’s jersey. The sweat rolling down Noel McGrath’s, and the tuft of grass still caught in the facemask of his helmet. Brian Cody making jokes. The swirl of noise and heat and constant murmuring of voices. Full on.
Making sense of all of that in a game situation — I nearly said reducing that to sense — can be daunting, hence the attraction of numbers and stats, the hard-and-fast figures which remain constant even as the storm rages. Description compresses and sharpens, but is it necessarily more accurate? (Hold your anger: I’m not about to launch into another discussion of what constitutes a wide. Relax.)
The number of variables — personal, game-specific, site-specific, ball-specific — tinge the numbers a little: is there any way of taking cognisance of that? After all, if you don’t, your numbers are seriously incomplete.
If you do . . . then sooner or later you back yourself into the Borgesian map-of-the-world-that’s-the-same-size-as-the-real world: you have so many qualifiers and caveats that the real reason for using stats and numbers — brevity, precision — are lost.
Certainly exactness in referring to the use of figures and statistics can often betray an inherent bias: how often have you seen discussion of a game being “reduced” to a matter of numbers and figures, a few stats which unlock the secret of the game? When Goethe said: “Grey is all your theory, but the golden tree of life is green,” you have the words of a man impatient with the wides count and the numbering of frees for and against.
Perhaps a slightly different view is needed to accept the entirety of the match experience, with the numbers acknowledged without gaining supremacy over that experience. If you could mix those both you might end up doing justice to the sense of an event.
Stop me if I have bored you before with the sorry tale of the time I forgot to put a bet on a horse for my wife during the Cheltenham Festival a few years ago (Sausalito Bay: won at 14-1, details I am never likely to forget).
If it were nowadays, of course, I would only have to rely on a couple of shady Singaporeans to rescue the situation for me.
This is because of a book I have stumbled across by Brett Forrest. Its title should tell you everything you need to know: The Big Fix: The Hunt for the Match-Fixers Bringing Down Soccer.
Even allowing for the forgivable hyperbole in “bringing down” a global game, this is a gripper of a book. Forrest refers to one game in 2011 between Kuwait and Jordan which was the focus of an attempted betting scam that was foiled by Fifa.
The interesting thing about thwarting that fix was that it happened in real time — the game took place in Sharjah, in the UAE but Fifa were wise to what was going on thanks to a few scrawled notes on paper found in a hotel room in Finland.
As the game progressed, and bets started to flood in online, which focused on a specific number of goals in the game — three — two goals were scored.
Then, however, the conspirators realised they were being observed, and after a couple of shady characters in the small attendance were consulted, “the fix was off”, as Forrest writes, and the game ended in a 1-1 draw, and the conspirators $500,000 out of pocket.
Forrest makes an obvious but telling point in his book about the inherent weakness of soccer when it comes to this kind of cheating; he lists off perhaps 10,000 professional teams in the sport worldwide, with associated medical staff, support workers, management teams, administrators. Regulating that kind of vast constituency is almost impossible, particularly in the face of well-organised, sophisticated criminals operating beyond rigid law and order regimes.
Hey, did I spoil the World Cup in Brazil there for you? Sorry about that.
I wouldn’t class myself a diehard fan of The Simpsons though I bow to no one in my admiration for Barney Gumble’s auteurish masterpiece submitted to the Springfield Film Festival, complete with his classic encounter with a group of local kids he mistakes for an AA meeting (“This is a girl scout troop, Mr Gumble,” “Maybe you girls just haven’t faced up to your problem”).
But a throwaway comment a few years ago by the cartoon’s creator, Matt Groening, stayed with me. When the cartoon took off in popularity, Groening was young and inclined to favour the tearaway son, Bart, but as his responsibilities grew with age, his sympathy drifted more to the put-upon father, Homer.
Natural enough, says you, and much the same in this racket. As the hair greys, and you have more and more in common with the men walking the line, though, does your sympathy for an increasingly alien cohort of youngsters lessen accordingly?
You can be brought up short every now and again by the generation gap. I recall asking a less-than-forthcoming rugby player a few years ago what album he last bought, in an effort to warm things up. He explained slowly (as though, to use a pal’s exact phrase, I were back from the missions trying to work a mobile phone) that he hadn’t bought an album in a long time, but he’d downloaded good stuff the previous week...
For a split-second I was going to explain the now-obsolete thrill of walking around town with a 12x12 plastic bag under your arm, showing you were au courant with the latest musical styles, but I breathed deeply and nodded. Anyway, his coach would understand that a lot better.
Good to hit Waterford last week and drop in on an old acquaintance who was looking hale and hearty and ready for 70 minutes in Thurles.
Ken McGrath overcame a serious heart operation a couple of weeks ago and an attractive challenge game has been arranged for June 27 as a fundraiser for him and for cancer research. Davy Fitzgerald will manage a Munster selection and Brian Cody will steer a Leinster selection, both teams featuring many players who played with and against Ken. Tickets, €10, will be available soon at various outlets or you can donate at any Permanent TSB, account number: 23053903, sort code 99 06 32.
Last week, the man himself looked able for the game, but one step at a time. See you in Walsh Park.
