On a recent football coaching course, there was an interesting discussion around the word ‘unlucky’ and its over-use in grassroots children’s football.
Picture the scene: a nine-year old kid is clean through on goal and, with parents watching and urging them on, scuffs their shot wide. There is a natural tendency and instinct to console the child with a reassuring call of “unlucky”.
Except in reality it wasn’t bad luck. It was actually down to some fundamental flaw in their technique and the way that they took the shot.
It was suggested on the course that the coach’s role is to identify what that flaw was and (at the appropriate time) offer some practical advice, and preferably something more tangible than “next time put it in the net” as was used by an opposing coach last weekend.
I was reminded of this when I found myself in conversation with a West Ham fan about our current predicament. “We should be safe already” I stated. “We’ve been really unlucky”.
To back up my claims, I reeled off a number of key moments that had deprived us of precious points: the late goals conceded against West Ham, Man City and Liverpool; missed chances against Stoke, Everton and Leicester.
“There’s ten points and safety right there. We’ve been so unlucky”.
However, just like the fictional example of the child scuffing a shot, all of those incidents were actually down to small individual errors and moments of flawed technique or poor decision-making.
Now as someone who recently ‘took out’ the shed window with a left-foot volley in the back garden I’m in no position to criticise the ability of any of our playing squad, however my constant assertion that we’ve been unlucky and not had our due rewards throughout this season is perhaps misguided. Far too often we have been the architects of our own apparent misfortune.
Or to put it another way, Lady Luck hasn’t smiled on us because maybe Lady Luck doesn’t actually exist.
Referees on the other hand are very real. You definitely can’t question their existence, only their decisions and sometimes their parentage. In a previous column, I made the claim that we had been on the wrong end of all manner of decisions and inferred that we were the victims of a conspiracy theory that would grace any grassy knoll in Dallas.
But again, is that bad luck or yet more examples of individual errors – albeit this time from blokes with whistles? Or maybe it’s neither and actually a case of yellow-tinted spectacles creating a biased perspective?
There is a website entitled the Hypothetical Premier League. The underlying premise is that each week, many incorrect decisions are made by officials which have a direct bearing on results and which could or should have been prevented by the use of video technology. The creators of the site analyse the weekend’s results and the key contentious incidents and with the benefit of replays and pundit analysis they have created an alternative league table based upon amended results.
There are (as they acknowledge) limitations to their approach, as illustrated by our home game against Crystal Palace. Under their method, had Simon Hooper not disallowed Cameron Jerome’s overhead kick for dangerous play, then the amended result would have been a 3-2 defeat instead of the actual 3-1 score line.
Those of us present on the day (and who still feel a sense of injustice) would suggest that a City equaliser, had it been allowed to stand, would have led to a point or possibly three given the change in dynamic. But of course that’s impossible and impractical to predict.
There’s also an assumption that when penalties should have been awarded (such as the assault on Matt Jarvis at Selhurst Park) they would have resulted in a goal. Having witnessed our exit in the Capital One Cup at Goodison earlier this season, I can confirm that a City penalty is by no means a given.
Nevertheless it’s an interesting concept and one that I had fully anticipated was going to validate my claims of injustice and misfortune.
Except it doesn’t.
In fact what it indicates is that after 34 games, instead of residing in the bottom three on goal difference, we could have been three points better off but sat in nineteenth place and a point adrift of West Brom and potential safety.
Interestingly it’s Newcastle fans who could lay claim to the greatest sense of injustice down at the bottom of the table, whilst at the top there’s an indication that Leicester’s fairy tale season has owed as much to questionable decisions as it has to the talents of Ranieri’s squad.
I had never been a fan of introducing video technology into football. Sports such as cricket or American football where the play is constrained into isolated passages of play naturally lend themselves to scrutiny by a third umpire with the technology at hand to make the right call.
However it is widely used in free-flowing sports such as rugby and when you consider the financial implications of Premier League survival and relegation, there’s a compelling case to eradicate the human error element.
Although video technology will never eradicate Cameron Jerome from skying the ball over the Everton bar from six yards out.
Sometimes, you have to make your own ‘luck’.
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Steve posts on Twitter @stevocook
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No, you have EVERY right to criticise our players technique. They are paid thousands and thousands of pounds a week to be able to kick a ball correctly and practice daily in order to do so. We talk about these players as if we should be apologising for their shortcomings. I think our squad have been pathetic this year. Their technique, know how and decision making has been disgraceful at times. Now that’s a fair and worthy assessment.
What a Great article, especially the last sentence about making your own luck, yes there have been times this season when decisions have not gone the CANARIES way,But also they have got away with a few things themselves, what I can’t stand is that at the moment players seem to think that they are in Swan Lake with their constant diving and theatricals, always thinking they are hard done by when decisions are not going their way, and unfortunately City have their fair share of players who come into that category, My opinion it’s more of Mind over Matter .
It’s an interesting theory Steve. Of course, we all forget about Jonny Howson’s double hand ball in the build up to our dramatic late winner against Newcastle. From our perspective these decisions are OK and usually attributed to “luck partly evening itself out for all those decisions that went against us!
Nothing to do with luck or referees in my opinion. Our predicament stems from poor procedures behind closed doors at Colney.
Too many times this season players have looked unsure of their positions in the team, with 2 or more players chasing the same ball like headless chickens (the prime example of this was the sickening head injury to O’Neil in his collision with Brady).
Our strikers have become more and more clueless as the season has ‘regressed’. Naismith started well like the great professional he is, but has been dumbed down into wandering around like a hungover pub team forward on a Sunday morning. His self belief has evaporated to the extent that he believes his only chance of scoring is to throw himself to the ground if the opposition comes within breathing distance – unfortunately, unlike Vardy, he is a poor actor. Bamford brought amazing natural skills. Again, after his first appearance or 2 his ability vanished.
Also, the players’ fitness has to be questioned. In most of our matches this season, our players have looked totally exhausted by the 70th minute. Have they given their all by punching above their weight? No, a check on the individual players stats shows that our players cover LESS distance than the majority of our opposition. And while still ranting about our players fitness levels, is it a coincidence that our once fabulous captain’s astonishing crash in form exactly coincided with him getting ill which has lead to him having to become vegan? Not his fault and nothing wrong with being vegan, but surely the management team should realize they should not have continued to select an out of form player (who they must have known was poorly), to the point of demoralizing him (THAT howler against Liverpool).
So, I blame our problems on what’s been happening at Colney: not the individual players, not Lady Luck and certainly not referees. Alex Neil is still learning his trade at the highest level. That has cost us our place at the top table this season. Let’s hope he learns quickly enough to get us straight back up next season.
OTBC
As much as I admire the general optimism on this site, it’s nice to have some realism right now. Some dealing with actual facts. Not ‘if only we’d signed…’ and ‘the board’s inaction has meant xxx’.
We have searched every cloud for silver linings and there aren’t many left. The simple fact is that AN has struggled tactically this season and it’s been our undoing.
Witness Sunderland – Gary O’Neil said “we knew Sunderland would set up for the counter and that’s how they caught us”. So why weren’t our tactics to stifle that threat at all costs?
As the writer very wisely says, we have been the architects of our own downfall. Any team that is happy to come out and say ‘our game management isn’t good enough’ has to be a concern. Blaming individual players isn’t the problem. Picking them in the first place is.
Cityfan (5) – Looking over the past few weeks’ articles, I’m not so sure you could describe it as ‘general optimism’. Any specific predictions about our fate have been negative ones.
It’s true that we’re less pessimistic than other City forums or Canarycall. An outsider might say that the balance here is more appropriate to the position City are in. We face a real battle to survive, clearly – but anyone following those other forums might be forgiven for thinking we were in Villa’s position rather than Norwich’s.
City need to match the grit Sunderland showed against Arsenal. Rather than deciding now that they’re not going to, how about giving them a chance? Our writers, starting with Gary, will then dissect what happened; I don’t think anyone could fairly accuse him of sugaring the pill.
No suggestions of sugaring pills here. My thoughts on the general optimism of this site are based on the ‘whatever happens we’re still a great club and we’ll be OK’ optimism on this site as opposed to the ‘if we’re relegated we’ll be out of business in six months and I told you this was going to happen ages ago anyway’ type of comments on other sites.
The simple truth is we haven’t been consistent enough, but if the ncfc that got some fantastic results this season turns up to Arsenal on Saturday we’ll be fine. AN has made some big errors and some great calls this season and its credit to him that he is able to pull results out of the bag still. And if we go down he’ll be stronger for it and I hope he stays. But in truth we don’t have the strength in depth or experience in management that Sunderland and Newcastle have and if we do go down we have to be realistic about why that happened. Not blame this that or the other. Learn from it, move on, get better.