Thumbs and backsides

Does everyone agree that, without changing a thing, Hull are likely to slide down the table as the season wears on?

Why would this be the case? They have won their games fair and square. Why won’t they stay in the top six?

Because they’re not that good. Over time, without changing a thing, Hull will slide down the table.

If this is true for a team at the top of the table, a team who are playing above themselves, why would this not also be true for a team at the bottom of the table? If a team is ‘better’ than its current league position, we might reasonably expect it to improve as the season goes on, without changing a thing.

I think that’s fair. Some reasons why it might not happen:

a) The team is not playing below itself, but really is *that bad*

b) Having failed to start well, the team might make counter productive changes and abandon sound philosophies in the hope that something changes their fortunes. And while this may work, it is as likely to be counter productive

c) The team could continue to play at its current level, but continue to fail to win games. This is not the same as point a). I fully believe that it is possible for a league table to ‘lie’ for a whole season. While it’s not consolation for the teams involved, the worst teams are not always the ones who go down.

Or, as discussed, things will gradually improve as the team at the bottom ‘finds its level’.

Is the above all still reasonable? I think it is. In the 80s a man called Bill James noticed that you could sometimes identify baseball teams due to improve before a season by looking for teams that underachieved the year before. Similarly, he noted that teams overachieving were very likely to regress the season after. We see this all the time in football too, the most recent example being Reading, who bucked the trend for a full season before hurtling downwards the year after. The team in the first season wasn’t as good as their results made them look, and would have been expected to finish lower in the table the year after. The same will apply to Hull: while they’ll presumably beat the drop this season, they should be expected to struggle next year. It’s called the plexiglass principle in the States, or simply, regression to the mean.

So which of the above can we expect?

Option a) can, I hope, be discounted. While there’s no such thing as a team that’s too good to go down, and certainly no Fulham team should make that assertion, it does seem probable that we are not one of the worst three teams in the league.

Option b) will depend on our ability to generate results, I suspect. Note that I’m not saying that *any* changes would be counter-productive. Indeed, some changes to shake things up might be just what the team needs. And if anyone’s going to avoid panicking it’s Roy Hodgson. I believe that Hodgson is strong minded enough to not abandon his principles in a desperate attempt to change the team’s fortunes. Changes will be well thought out and organic, rather than desperate and rash. Which I think is a good thing. So Hodgson should steer clear of this pitfall. The board might not…

Option c) seems quite likely to me. If we continue to play as we are, even with the expected uptick in fortunes (goals), we may not survive.

Herein lies the problem. I believe that, as Fulham fans, we have to accept that in any given season we may get relegated. We can spend money on players who we think can help us to avoid these things, but any team who expects to finish in the bottom half of the table should also be prepared to have a season where things don’t go well and a bottom half finish becomes a bottom three finish. Not that we should glibly accept this, smile ruefully and curse the gods of probability, but reminding ourselves that the dividing line between success and failure in football is minute cannot do any harm. Not that this helps either, but I remain unconvinced that wholesale changes are required, or that if they are implemented they will necessarily make any difference to the season. Wins breed wins; we just need to nab a couple of the buggers. Just as a batsman in cricket may well rely on a dropped catch or two on his way to a hundred, we could do with a bit of unexpected fortune to kick start our own march to glory (or 14th place). The Sunderland escape might even have been that piece of good fortune….