There are no miracles, just luck in football
There’s no telling what impacts the most on match results. Steve Sumner became part of Kiwi folklore in the 1982 World Cup campaign.
‘‘The ball will decide who wins.’’ – Zinedine Zidane
The textbooks tell you that football is: Physical, eg speed, strength, stamina. Technical, eg control, passing, shooting. Tactical – every decision you make. Psychological, ie your mental attitude.
Another book, The Numbers Game, tells us that luck – aka ‘‘bounce of the ball’’, ‘‘the breaks’’ and ‘‘rub of the green’’ – plays as big a role as all the above combined. Some obvious examples. In 2009, Liverpool dominated Sunderland, but a rare Sunderland shot deflected off a BEACHBALL for the game’s only goal. (Question: What are the chances of that happening? Answer: a) Sunderland don’t know, and b) they don’t care.)
England’s Gary Neville passes back to goalie Paul Robinson. The ball bobbles over the keeper’s foot and into the net.
A penalty shootout in Italy. A shot hits the bar and flies up. The striker is distraught at losing the game, the keeper runs off to celebrate. The ball comes down on the six yard line, and trickles back into the goal. The ‘‘losing’’ team win. In 2010 Chelsea outshot Birmingham 25-1. Birmingham won 1-0.
In every match, luck affects the game. The balls bounces around, often under no-one’s control. A tackle – does the ref give the free kick this way, that way, or not at all? Does he send off a player, or let him stay on?
Every decision, every deflection, affects the path the game takes in unintended, unpredictable ways.
Pass it left, the game might finish 4-4. Pass it right, the result is 1-0. Every moment is Sliding Doors, and the match that unfolds is one of an infinite number of potential matches.
The Numbers Game discusses Liverpool’s win in the 2005 Champions League. The Miracle of Istanbul. Liverpool trailed Milan 3-0 at halftime. Never before had Liverpool recovered from 3-0 to win a match. The turnaround wasn’t news to Swiss statistician Jacob Bernoulli, though.
He figured out that if you do something long enough, sooner or later statistical outliers will occur eg you’ll win a game from 3-0 down. Or score a goal via a beachball.
On any given occasion, the chances are small. But in the long run, it’s a certainty.
Fans attributed the win to Steve Gerrard’s remarkable drive. Or coach Benitez’s tactical genius. But those things had been ineffective numerous times before.
No, a statistical outlier happened that night, and in a freak six minutes Liverpool scored three goals, then won the shootout.
Which sport is most susceptible to chance? Football, because the underdog wins more than in any other game. In sports where luck plays a minor role – eg 100m sprint – the best man almost always wins.
The scientists studied ‘‘intransitive triplets’’. If football is only about ability, then if team A beats Team B, and B beats C, A should beat C, right? Not as often as they should.
They concluded half of all matches are decided by chance. You may as well toss a coin.
The league table doesn’t lie? It can and does. Injuries, undeserved penalties, crazy deflections and offside goals are worth several points and several places on the table.
If luck is so important, then why bother training? Because ability is also crucial, and the better you are, the better your chances.
Over a season, Chelsea will finish above Burnley. But on a given day, Burnley have a chance.
Bobby Charlton put it best when West Germany came from 2-0 down to beat England at the 1970 World Cup. The critics had a field day. The goalie did this. The manager should have done that.
Charlton’s assessment: ‘‘They didn’t start playing better, we didn’t play worse. It just happened.’’ In other words, the ball decided. One man who greatly improved the odds for any side he played for was legend Steve Sumner. One way he did that, he explained to me once, was by continuing his runs right into the six yard box, where he scored lots of his goals. Many midfielders stop at the penalty box.
Another suggestion from Steve: Stop being soft and get regular prostate checks. Not as much fun as scoring a goal, but much more valuable. Two top tips. Cheers Steve.
Think of Steve Sumner, and the mind’s eye goes to a glorious year, 1981, when soccer in New Zealand became football, the All Whites became heroes, when every time the team played at Mt Smart the sun shone, the banks were packed, and a legend grew in front of our eyes.
Steve’s death this week, from prostate cancer, an illness he faced with the same steely attitude he took onto the football pitch, recalls that golden time when three Englishmen, captain Steve, coach John Adshead, and assistant coach Kevin Fallon, made Kiwis believe in a sport that previously struggled for credibility.
There are times in life when the stars align and in ‘81 that happened with the All Whites in New Zealand.
Until then soccer had been the game for kids not good enough to play rugby.
At Monday assemblies at one major school in Auckland at the time, pupils were told how ‘‘the men’’ in the first XV had fared in the weekend and then the score for ‘‘the boys’’ in the first XI.
But when Sumner and his team shone rugby was at its lowest ebb in New Zealand. The ‘81 Springbok tour had little effect on the sport in the heartland but it was different in the cities. In Auckland, there were many rugby clubs who saw their junior grades decimated and the kids who left were playing football.
There was a sporting void, and Steve Sumner and his men were ready to fill it.
The All Whites played 15 qualifying games for the ‘82 world cup in Spain. Eight were played in Auckland, four in autumn, one in winter, and then three in spring.
By the time they played China at the start of October, the All Whites were national heroes.
A bit like the Beatles, a likeness which often included the accents, the All Whites offered something for everyone.
Adshead, a genuinely charming, likeable man, as I discovered working with him at a radio station after the world cup was over, was voted in a Readers’ Digest poll the most trusted person in New Zealand after Sir Edmund Hillary. He reached a stage of acceptance where he could say ‘‘us Kiwis’’ in a broad Lancashire accent in a television commercial and not have one viewer snigger.
If John was bit too urbane for your tastes, step up his assistant Kevin Fallon. The bad cop to Adshead’s good cop, the iron fist for Adshead’s velvet glove. Football’s Terminator.
Fallon was the man to put the grit in the side. He has never been able to sugar-coat his words and it’s that bedrock honesty that made him a nightmare to wayward trainers.
There’s a story that one of the All Whites was on the ground during the game with Australia at the Sydney Cricket Ground.
‘‘What’s wrong?’’ called Fallon. ‘‘My leg. I think it might be broken,’’ said the player. ‘‘Bloody get up or I’ll come out and make sure it’s broken.’’ The player got up.
And then there was Steve Sumner, tireless, tough, and fearless. It helped that with his olive skin and drooping moustache he looked like the sort of western movie tough guy who stopped the music when he walked into a bar.
Fans got so much from the team. The performances were great, from the first, drawn, game at Mt Smart with Australia, to the last Mt Smart match, a draw with a multi-million dollar funded side from Saudi Arabia. There were heroes by the score. A teenaged Ricki Herbert, who seemed to stay suspended indefinitely when he leapt to head in a corner. Keith Mackay, the smallest man in the squad, who was called ‘‘Buzzer’’ because he just never stopped. Or Grant Turner, a man with the torso of a bricklayer, the feet of a dancer, and ‘‘I hate cops’’ tattooed on his chest, a reminder of hard-scrabble teenage years.
There was even New Zealand’s first, and to date only, brush with football hooliganism, when, in the game with Kuwait, an idiot ran on the field and threw a can of beer at the Indonesian referee.
‘‘Sometimes you think the ref is a prick,’’ All White Brian Turner would say later, ‘‘but this (ref) went beyond that.’’
With the loss of Steve Sumner, part of the ‘81-82 fairytale, dies too. The men he captained will feel it even more. He was a leader, Bobby Almond told author John Matheson in 2007, ‘‘I’d follow over the hill at Gallipoli. No questions asked.’’