Subs, etc

Yesterday a lot of us wanted subs.  We didn’t get them.  Blackburn made subs and won late on.  2+2=4, right?  Maybe so.

Roy has been a football manager since 1976.  We’ll call that 30 years, allowing for partial seasons, etc.  Nowithstanding international work, let’s say that he’s managed 45 games a season over those 30 years.   That’s 1,350 matches.

In all of those games Roy will have had the option of using substitutes.  Sometimes he’ll have been ahead and in need of reinforcements to see it out; sometimes he’ll have been behind and needing to change things; other times it’ll be tightly balanced, and any small move could tilt things either way.  He’ll have seen it all several times over, and probably tried all conceivable approaches to substitutes in that time.  He’ll have sent on forwards early to shake things up, he’ll have left a struggling team unchanged because he senses that it’s just about hanging on.

Sometimes he’ll have made changes that work.  Sometimes he’ll have made changes that haven’t worked.  Sometimes he’ll have done nothing and been either rewarded or penalised for it.  Whatever.  He’s had the time to get a feel for these things, to build an approach.  There will presumably be no hard and fast rules, he’ll just play it as he sees it, relying on instincts honed over 1,350 football matches.

One thing I’ve always felt about football is that the game is very random.  I say this a lot and people rightly question the stance, but I pretty much stand by it.  In the old days of FA Cup replays you’d sometimes see a draw, then another draw, then a hammering in the second replay.  These days you sometimes see two teams play one another twice in succession, perhaps because of a cup engagement, and sometimes you’ll see very different results.   In football there are a number of moments on which entire matches hinge.  Remember England beating Germany 5-1 in Munich?  Germany could have been out of sight in that match before England hit their stride.  England beating Croatia 4-1 recently?  Our first goal came when one Croatia defender cleared the ball against the backside of another.  Not that these incidents diminish what comes next, but sometimes weird things happen and games spin out of control, and there’s little anyone can do or could have done about it.

It happens all the time at Fulham too.  We were able to beat Manchester City after being 2-0 down because Joe Kamara did something good, but another Joe, Hart, let his shot between his legs after being superlative until then.  Then Danny Murphy hit a penalty and Hart saved it, but that rebound could have gone anywhere.  It came back to Murphy, who converted.  Kamara scored in injury time to seal an improbable win.  We beat Birmingham, who missed a golden chance in the first half, then lost Liam Ridgewell to injury.  Ridgewell’s replacement was our old friend Franck Queudrue, who promptly lost Brian McBride for goal 1, and then set up Erik Nevland for goal 2.  I could go on.

Football falls on these tiny moments, some go your way, some don’t.  And just as you can flip a coin and get a head 4 times in a row if you try enough, you can also get a run of good fortune when you need it most and therefore stay in the top division if you’re lucky.

Which is not to undermine the team’s play in those games, because they were well prepared and kept playing their game, and this is entirely my point.   If Roy Hodgson gets his team physically and mentally prepared – and he stressed this at the fans’ forum – then sometimes that will be enough on the day and sometimes it won’t, but if you take care of things to the best of your ability then theoretically you maximise your chances of winning each football match.

But there will always be mistakes, unponderable weirdness, and surprises.  Roy knows this and said as much at the fans’ forum.  Football is unpredictable.  As a manager his job is to prepare, to control the controllables, and to go from there.  On the field anything can happen.

Perhaps he takes this too far.  Jose Mourinho would sometimes remove a misfiring winger after no time at all if it felt like the game wasn’t shaping up to plan.  Jose Mourinho had a big ego, felt that he could control everything, that he could shape football matches.  And perhaps he was right.   Perhaps Roy is too passive, believing that things have been set up to plan and from there we might win and we might not, but the controllables were controlled and that’s the main thing.  I don’t know.  But again, Roy has developed a feel for making his substitutions over a long period of time, backs his own judgement, and has largely been successful in so doing.  So yes he might have been slow on the trigger yesterday, but something will have told him to hold off, something would have made him think that things were going to be alright out there.  Just turns out that it didn’t work out.  Sometimes that’s the way it goes.