AGAINST THE RUN OF PLAY

We were the better team! We deserved to win!

Well maybe so, but can’t every supporter remember a game or two when it didn’t quite work out that way? I remember days in the lower divisions when Crewe would play a team off the park to lose by a hatful (Hull and Preston spring to mind), Arsenal’s seeming inability to kill games off cost them (not wanting to forget Michael Owen) the 2001 FA Cup, and let’s face it, Zidane wasn’t the only reason England lost to France in Euro 2004. We blew it.

Sure, there’s luck in football, it plays a big part. Sheringham’s goal which set up United’s Champions League victory was a miskick, Geoff Hurst’s hat-trick was completed by chance as he tried to whack the ball out of play to steal a few seconds, and at Crewe, one late evening against Hereford United, I saw the most one-sided game EVER finish a miserable 1-1. We WERE the better side! We DID deserve to win... but did we?

Pardon me while I state the obvious for a moment... football is a team sport with a key objective, that being to score more goals than the opposing team, normally achieved with a balance of attack and defence. Gaining and keeping possession will go a long way to achieving this but is not enough in itself. Likewise, holes in the defence do not determine results without input from the opposition.
Every player in a team is representative of its desire to both score and prevent goals, so where an infinitely superior team loses to a last minute deflection against the run of play, they only have themselves to blame.

A failure to convert superiority, creativity, possession, craft and passion on the pitch into hard currency is not an irrelevant factor in a side’s deservability of victory. By the same token, who could forget the spellbinding performance of Jason Kearton away at Blackburn that time, which complemented a soft goal to produce in the words of a fellow supporter, “the most unjust result I have ever seen.” That afternoon an undoubtedly superior Rovers side failed to overcome a team in its entirety. Whether it was poor finishing by Rovers or heroic goalkeeping that won the points for Crewe, as a unit, they did the bits that mattered.

Heroes in football are without exception good players, normally inspirational, but always match winners. Players are idolised because they not only change games but win games. The difference between the striker who gets the freedom of the town and one who retires at 30 to run a small business is not simply a question of the talent they may have had, but the goals they scored. Chris Sutton was an integral part of a successful (although not by current standards) Chelsea side but failed to capture the imagination of the supporters because he was judged by his scoring rate. How many of his misses were excused because he deserved to do better? It barely made any difference that he had the talent, and had proved it at other clubs (and indeed since). What count, are results. 
It’s no different for managers. Sudden-death penalties in a playoff final tip the balance between long-term contract and managerial casualty, where the fate of carefully thought out training regimes and imaginative playing patterns lies at the feet of a single player.

On a wider scale, in the mind of the supporter, merit is not always enough. Playing attractive football is preferable to most (as we understand at Crewe), but not to results and neat passing alone does not deserve points. Getting to the final of a tournament is still a significant step from winning it, in much the same way that breaking into the six-yard box still leaves one final ingredient. Where that is either prevented or not achieved, the job has not been done.

While football is a mixture of teamwork and individual talent, usually the side playing as a unit is the stronger. It’s normally the case that the team who plays better will win, but it’s also the case that games can be won or lost through error, or a single piece of magic. But these are all part of the game, so even if the final score doesn’t reflect the possession or number of chances created, it is the product of the overall performance of a unit of players with a single aim in mind.

Whatever could be said of Zinedine Zidane last year as he turned the England France fixture on its head, even he would have been ineffective had England simply taken their chances. In football, as with any other sport, to win, and ‘to deserve to win’, you have to satisfy the criteria of winning, which as we all know is hitting the back of the net.

© Chris Trickett February 2005