1 March 2014 - Bristol City 2 Gillingham 1
Farthest
South is one of my favourite pages on Wikipedia. A lot of the
Wiki-holes I fall down have started there, terminated there, or led
me there apparently by chance. I tend to find polar exploration
endlessly fascinating. The true stories of men (pretty much
exclusively men, I'm afraid) from our past battling against an
environment as far removed from their experience as the surface of
the Moon is from ours today is the closest real-life equivalent I've
found to the beloved science-fiction tales of my youth; and the way
in which one can see every facet of a person cast against that bleak
white ice makes for some of the most enthralling historical character
studies you'll find.
Getting to the South
Pole was an incremental process spanning centuries, each expedition
besting the last by degrees of latitude, ranging from the ten degrees
Captain Cook gained in 1773 to the half-degrees and fractional
degrees that the focus narrowed to as explorers in the second half of
the 19th and first half of the 20th centuries
closed in on 90°.
There's
not much, really, that separates an expedition like James Ross' which
gets to the edge of the Antarctic landmass from an expedition like
Roald Amundsen's which makes history by reaching the South Pole. Not
to the untrained eye, at least. If you saw two boats preparing at
the same dock, the gear they'd be loading would like rather similar;
furs, grease, dogs, sledges, Bibles, scientists, risqué postcards,
and so on. But the
differences would be there, those fractional anomalies marking one
expedition out for success and the other for (relative) failure.
It's the equivalent of what sportspeople, proper, Olympic-gold
winning athletes, trainers and team managers, talk about as the 1% -
those marginal gains that make all the difference. One set of
provisions and equipment will get you to 88°23',
which is a long old, cold old way, but it's not all the way. You
need a (only very slightly) different set to 90°.
And
I guess footballers must be like that too. Sure, we've got that
trained eye to a degree, we can tell Iniesta's control from
Elliott's; but to the non-fan there's no difference, they're two
footballers. Frankly if Andrés
and Marvin turned up to your local five-a-side kickabout they'd
probably impress you roughly the same amount; Marvin might even have
the edge if you principally wanted stories about Ivan Sproule.
All
the difference here, as you and I well know, is in technical ability
– and while the two seem sometimes to be worlds apart, there
probably is only 1% between being able to manipulate a football to
professional level, and to manipulate it at world-class level. While
we do, of course, hear from time to time about players who didn't
make it because their head is “not right” - a Michael Johnson or,
frankly, a Jay Emmanuel-Thomas – by the time you've become a
professional this cannot commonly be a deciding factor. We don't
like to admit it sometimes but becoming a professional footballer is
hard.
It requires great discipline, great self-denial, the commitment and
focus to carry on during your developing years when other temptations
present themselves, the resilience to deal with knockdowns, get up
and do it all again; all that Rudyard Kipling stuff. The process of
getting to professional status is in many ways a process eliminating
those who don't have that stuff. It's not perfect, sure, no process
is; but you weigh those with the discipline it must continue to take
in order to draw a paycheck from Rochdale, Alloa or FC Paris month-in
month-out against those identifiable-by-name outliers with the talent
but not the application, and the proportion who fall at the last
hurdle looks fractional.
What
I'm describing and saying is a given is that intangible thing which
we like to call “passion”. By definition a professional
footballer has that, just as a well-off scion of the British ruling
class who decides to brave possible death and certain frostbite in
the Antarctic has passion for his calling. Yet football fans are
obsessed with it; in this country, at least. It's the thing which
makes our boys different from everybody else – the passionate Brit
vs the milquetoast foreigner with his diving and his technical
ability. As though the sacrifices to be made to become Francesco
Totti are lower than those necessary to become Smokin' Jack Wilshere.
The
other thing we're painfully guilty of doing is conflating “passion”
and “effort” with winning and losing. This weekend, you can be
sure that City would have been criticised for “not wanting to win
enough”, “not trying enough”, or “being pampered” had Simon
Gillett's fabulous effort caught the outside of the post and bounces
harmlessly out of play. Even if every other move in the game had
been identical, our superstitious search for uncountable outside
agencies would kick in. Just as when City played Tranmere the other
week it was, on certain forums, unacceptable to describe the players
as “tired”. They've got large cars you see, they don't work 40
hours weeks, so tiredness isn't acceptable. The scientific fact that
a set of athletes exerting themselves for the second time in five
days will always lag behind a similar set for endurance, technique
and reaction time doesn't come into it. They shouldn't be tired;
they should want it enough to overcome it, and their pay packet
should somehow guarantee it. The unquantifiable triumphing over the
factual.
(None
of this of course absolves the manager from a) refusing to make
subsitutions until very late in the previous game; b) naming an
unchanged side; or c) failing to take advantage when presented with
identically disadvantaged opposition at Bramall Lane the following
weekend. But that's a side issue.)
It's
handy to have something science can't account for in order to explain
the outcome bias we all suffer from when it comes to football – the
feeling that if a manager did something, and the team won, then it
must by definition have been a good decision, rather than simply a
rebalancing of risk and probability in what becomes a largely random
environment. In the same way that arguments about football (this
happens a lot on TV) often boil down the attempted refuting of
statistical evidence based upon “the evidence of my own eyes”; a
canard used by those who then mistakenly believe themselves to have
won, rather than conceded, the debate. We all have eyes, but we also
have brains riddled with confirmation bias to interpret our optical
input. And it's helpful to invent a perceived gap – a mythical
disjoint between one player's ability to “run through brick walls”
- in order to smooth over the equivalent gap between reality and
interpretation. “Desire” then moves from useful idiot to crucial
lens through which the game must be seen. The cheer that goes up at
the Gate every week for the player who loses the ball, but pursues
his tackler twenty yards toward our goal to win it back at the cost
of a throw, losing possession and territorial advantage but
demonstrating desire, never fails to amuse me.
The
1% isn't desire. Apart from in the rarest of cases, that's a given.
It's technique, ability, and crucially making the right decisions
consistently that gets you success. Scott of the Antarctic had every
ounce of desire you could possibly want, and by all accounts was a
leader of men. Roald Amundsen was a colder, more obsessive
character. But he had the sort of obsession that led to living with
the Inuit to prepare for polar conditions; using dog-driven sleds to go
above the ice rather than ponies to trudge through it; understanding
how the food they ate and their customs allowed them to maintain a
society in some of the most inhospitable conditions on the planet.
That's the learning that allowed him to stock that boat in such a way
that everything on board would take him to the South Pole.
Scott's
passion got him damn close. But his British belief that “how it
has been done” is “how it should be done”, and his conviction
that our way was right and there was little to learn from others, saw
him prepare that marginally different ship that was marginally unfit
for purpose. Not totally wrong. But maybe 1% out. That crucial 1%.
I
don't know what you want from football. Personally I'd like to see
us win enough games to stay up. And I'd like to see us do that by
having a bit more than the opposition on sufficient occasions. So
I'll continue to be interested in what's quantifiable and measurable,
understanding that in a one-off game, or even a dozen one-off games,
cause and effect don't necessarily exist as two points on a nice
clear line. What I won't do is waste my time shouting for a given.
We've
all got the same Bibles on the boat. But faith alone won't get us to
the Pole.
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