Confirmation bias
What?
Paul DePodesta works in the front office of the San Diego Padres baseball team. So? Well he’s a very bright and interesting man, writes a blog about his experiences at San Diego too. I liked this little nugget:
Very simply, confirmation bias describes the act of accepting only those facts that buttress a pre-existing opinion while discarding those facts that run contrary to one’s opinion. In short, we’re much more comfortable continuing to believe what we already believe.
So true. And this…
So, there we sit discussing the skills of a highly qualified and tested group where the distinction between players is very, very thin. However, what becomes clear is that for the players we want to keep in big league camp, we generally talk about what they can do. For the players we want to send down, we tend to focus on what they can’t do, so the decisions seem obvious (which they’re not). Understand, I keep using “we” because every one of us in the room is guilty - we can’t help ourselves!
I think we see a lot of this in discussions about Fulham players. This is tied into what Colin’s doing at Championship at Best. If you haven’t filled the survey in yet, go for it.
Kevin Nolan worried that Bolton are going soft
This article is about Arsene Wenger, but check out the bit at the end:
Wenger will be unimpressed by an admission from Bolton’s Kevin Nolan that he told a team-mate to foul Theo Walcott. “I said to Jlloyd Samuel, ‘Give him a little kick and see if he comes back at you’,” Nolan said, adding: “We are in danger of losing that side - the roughing up of people.”
I wouldn’t look at this twice were it not for several recent attempts to clean out Jimmy Bullard. The first of which was by Kevin Nolan. Nice man.
Looks like things are moving in the right direction for Sheffield United, at West Ham’s expense. Good. How this ever got to this point is a mystery to me; extraordinary gutlessness from the league at the time. Anyway, it partly explains why we were able to buy Zamora and Paintsil:
West Ham’s keenness to sell players this summer is now thought to have been prompted by a need to raise funds in anticipation of the judgment. Freddie Ljungberg was paid to leave to get him off the wage bill, Bobby Zamora and John Paintsil were sold to Fulham, and Richard Wright and Nolberto Solano also left.
Finally, the formatting’s gone again. They must have updated me. Oh well.
Or
Dan at WithAPlum has put it far better than I managed.
Fulham will lose some games because Roy Hodgson is a patient man. Fulham will win some games because Roy Hodgson is a patient man. Fulham will lose some games because crazy things happen in a sport decided by three or four definite events over the course of ninety minutes.
(that’s an excerpt - click above for the whole thing)
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.
Roy speaks
Here.
Says that the diagonal ball got us while John Paintsil was struggling with a foot injury, which would explain why Paintsil didn’t track the runner, which meant Hughes had to try to cover… well you can see all that below. Interesting stuff though.
Proper report: Blackburn 1-0 Fulham
Unlike me, Jamie was at Ewood this afternoon. Here’s his report. Great stuff as ever.
So – after the highs of two consecutive wins, a disappointing result. This was a day that had begun full of promise and good cheer – literally – some bright spark had realised that ‘John Paintsil’ has the same number of syllables as ‘Michael Vaughan’ and thus a new chant (to the tune of ‘Kumbaya’) was born. Our current cult hero was worshipped repeatedly throughout the first half, and Fulham’s travelling fans had further reason to be in good spirits. The team had continued where it left off against Bolton, passing crisply and intelligently, with Simon Davies especially impressive, and we were only denied an early goal when Paul Robinson (‘England’s number six!’) made a brilliant reaction save from Andrew Johnson.
It was an open game. We were playing nicely, but Blackburn were also finding too much space around the edge of our area (that central midfield issue again) and Emerton nearly capitalised when he waltzed into the box and curled a shot against the bar. Other from that, our opponents seemed happy to concentrate their efforts on trying to get someone sent-off, and it was astounding that three reckless challenges within ten minutes were punished only by two bookings. Two of these tackles were on Jimmy Bullard, who was also targeted by Kevin Nolan last week. Something to keep an eye on, perhaps – could it be that, realising the seriousness of his recent knee-injury, Premiership managers are cynical enough to instruct their teams to intimidate Bullard out of the game?
Unfortunately, on this occasion it worked – in the second half Bullard less effective as he clearly (and understandably) shirked a number of challenges for fear of getting clobbered again. The referee, perhaps realising (or having been told) the error of his earlier ways, was now giving many of the marginal decisions Fulham’s way, which aggravated the home crowd. A couple of challenges started flying in (I feared our hero Paintsil might let it all get to his head) and for a short spell it looked as if things might spill over. All, of course, because the referee had failed to assert his control in the first half. And it’s always the sign of a bad official who manages to anger both sets of players and fans during a match.
The descent of the game into scrappiness did not help us: we were, of course, without a scrapper (undoubtedly something that Paul Ince and Blackburn realised). A couple of chances were created for – and missed by – Johnson and Zamora, but then the rest of the team began to fade with Bullard. Gera, strangely quiet, tried swapping wings with Davies but was equally ineffective on the right as on the left. Our front pair began to look tired, and Murphy was the most ragged of all – clumsily fouling, miscontrolling and misplacing passes. But no movement was forthcoming from our bench. Ince, on the other hand, brought on three players, and for the first time his team began to look like they might cause us problems. The away crowd grew quiet and sat back nervously, our ambitions now revised to securing the 0-0.
Sadly, with five minutes remaining, Blackburn conjured up a good goal. Villanueva chipped a clever ball into Santa Cruz, who headed down for Matt Derbyshire to finish neatly. If I were being harsh on Roy Hodgson, that previous sentence might have read: Lively second-half substitute Villanueva chipped a clever ball into Santa Cruz, who headed down, and substitute Matt Derbyshire used his fresh legs to get ahead of Brede Hangeland and finish neatly.
As supporters with emotional investments which ultimately hang more on results than performances, it’s easy to channel our frustration after a defeat by convincing ourselves there was an easy solution. There’s no guarantee, of course, that any changes would have made a difference to the eventual outcome. But one can’t help wondering, for instance, how Leon Andreasen might have relished the opportunity to get himself involved once the game began to get heated in the second half. Or how, watching Bobby Zamora grind to a halt, battered and bruised after an afternoon of grappling with Christopher Samba, Erik Nevland must have been itching to come on and influence things as he has done in the past.
A minor quibble, compared to our problems of recent seasons? Probably. Roy is doing a solid job, no doubt – we’re continuing to play good football and indeed on another day this was a match we could just as easily have won 1-0 as lost. It wasn’t a bad performance. But it was an opportunity missed, and a bad result. And it’s especially frustrating to watch these matches slip away given some of the real promise we are showing. Let’s hope next week cheers us up again.
Rare Keiths
When was the last time a Premiership team contained two players named Keith?
Blackburn 1-0 Fulham
A game we could have won. For one thing we had several good chances to do so; for another Blackburn were fortunate to have eleven men on the field after several brutal assaults on Fulham players in the first half.
Good start: Simon Davies’ cross was diverted towards goal by Andy Johnson, only for Paul Robinson to save well. There followed a series of Blackburn attempts that weren’t dangerous in themselves, but perhaps hinted at a problem in front of our back four.
This is going to be referred to as “Hodgson’s Choice” from now on. Does he go with his four passers, hoping that by keeping the ball and attacking as a group, we can get by without a ball winner? Or does he sacrifice some fluidity by plugging the hole that is usually found between our defence and midfield?
So far we have seen four lots of option A, and in the two games we have won this has served us well. But in the two games we have lost it has been a noticeable weakness. Against Hull we conceded when Geovanni walzed towards the edge of our box and smashed his shot beyond Schwarzer. Today we conceded late when a delightful Villanueva chip - from the defensive midfielder patrol area - dropped behind our back four, onto Santa Cruz’s head, and from there into the path of Matt Derbyshire, who did the rest. It’s a big problem, and one that seems more acute away from home.
It was a very open game. In the first half both sides had chances, Brett Emerton hit the angle of bar and post, Bobby Zamora retorting with two headers from close in: he might have converted either. We played quite good football but always looked vulnerable. Blackburn were clearly interested in making a point: Bullard was clobbered twice, Johnson got a battering too, and surely somewhere a red card should have been shown to stop this. Injuries happen this way.
Blackburn, perhaps sensing that a line had been crossed, got more legal in the second half, and Fulham began to take control. Zamora had another headed opportunity, Johnson was put clean through but was thwarted by Robinson again, and there was a sense that we were now the better team.
Not so. Blackburn picked our pocket in the 81st minute, with one substitute setting up another.
Johnson interviewed
“I just can’t believe how well we pass the ball,” he says. “I knew we had some top players but I’ve been surprised just how good they actually are. We don’t ever play long balls, we always try to do it the right way, and it’s fabulous for me because we played a lot of long-ball stuff at Everton. I’m looking at the way we play and I’m thinking, ‘This team has got a great chance’. Everything I’ve seen has made me believe that I made the right decision in coming here.”
Then:
As does playing off a taller strike partner - in Fulham’s case, Zamora. “I came off the pitch after the Bolton game thinking, ‘Bloody hell, what a player!’ I just don’t think he gets the credit he deserves. If Thierry Henry had scored the goal that Bobby scored against Bolton, people would have been talking about it for three or four weeks.”
Fantastic stuff. Let’s hope we can keep it up.
Big game today. Nobody quite knows what to make of Blackburn, but we’re not the best in the North West so I guess another 1-1 would be a decent outcome.
Fulham Fans’ Forum: just back, quick overview
Just back in from the fans’ forum. Topline findings: we’re in good hands. Roy and Alastair Mackintosh ‘get it’. They’re football people and seem to be in tune with what Fulham is about.
Specifics…
Stadium to head towards 30,000 and beyond over the next two years, talked about redevelopment of the Riverside and Hammy Ends.
Goal music is the subject of focus groups at the moment. The good news here is that Alastair Mackintosh seems, reading between the lines (there’s a lot of this), to be against the idea as well. He made some commment about kids liking it, but also that he’d never had this at Man City and that he’d like fans to be able to make their own atmosphere. Everyone seemed pleased about the atmosphere at the Cottage, so….
Er… Tom Watt read out my question about Reading last year, specifically, did the players suddenly play well because it looked like they were relegated and had nothing to lose. Roy made it clear that this was not the case, and talked about how the team just kept on playing as they always do. Later in the evening he talked about football matches being unpredictable buggers, and all you can do is prepare the team mentally and physically and go from there. His quote, I think, was “I’m not a gambling man, but if I was I wouldn’t bet on football matches”.
Other things: Someone asked why Hangeland doesn’t always pick up the tall forward. Hodgson said that Brede and Aaron like it the way they are with the left-right thing and prefer to stay that way. Roy conceded that sometimes against the likes of Peter Crouch you have to accept that you won’t win all the headers, so you have to focus on other things like getting in front of him, and focusing on the second ball.
Someone else asked about backup at centre-back, and we got an interesting response about how the sort of calibre player we wanted would have cost too much (fee plus wages), even for some loan options. It’s a hard balancing act, getting someone in to be a backup to a first choice pairing, and it sounds like Roy just wasn’t able to land someone who ticked all his boxes. He was quite dismissive of Adrian Leijer’s future, but mentioned Chris Baird (who he conceded was more of an Aaron Hughes than a Brede Hangeland) and also reminded people that John Paintsil plays centre-back too.
Someone asked about Seol’s presence in the team, and Roy was straight back saying that he thought Seol was unlucky to be dropped after two good performances against Hull and Arsenal. Fair enough.
He also praised Clint Dempsey a couple of times, but jokingly said that he and Clint were often at loggerheads, Clint being a good player, but thinking he’s a *very* good player. This was half tongue in cheek, for all those taking it too literally.
I stammered out something about whether he’d always played a passing game or whether he’d done so because he’d inherited midfielders who pass and don’t tackle. He replied that he had. I had a part 2, about the role of Andreasen or Etuhu, but had at this point frozen and failed to ask that question.
He was quite down on the state of the academy, but made the important point that managers aren’t going to look to bring on 15 year olds because most managers will be out of a job before these players are relevant to the club. Which is not to say that he’s not doing much - he is - but I now see why we have to be practical about these things. He said that our academy has been about bringing on local kids, but that there wasn’t the talent there that he’d want to see. He did single out Wayne Brown and Rob Milsom, but nothing much more. Had I been bold I’d have asked about Laribi and Moscatiello, but the cat was still elsewhere with my tongue.
So that’s about that. I’ve probably forgotten a lot, but hey ho. He told a Tommy Cooper joke and an anecdote about Frank Sinatra, and I got him to sign a copy of “Schultz” by JP Donleavy (”expect the worst, and that’s what you’ll get, only it will be much worse”, quoted in a press conference before the Reading game last year, and now a treasured possession). He is apparantly a big Donleavy fan and is re-reading his books. Needless to say, I smiled like an idiot at this point and offered nothing useful in return.
I took the opportunity to nip out by the pitch:
Wish I’d taken a camera now (these were on the mobile), but hey.
Something different: Moritz Volz in Southampton 2-2 Ipswich
Thanks to the wonders of modern transport I was able to get from work in Weybridge to meet my friend Dan in Basingstoke by just after 6pm. From there we drove to the south coast, parked up in a dusty red light area, and wandered towards St Mary’s Stadium. We stopped for a pint on the way, where I banged my head on a low beam. Fine, it happens, but until this morning I couldn’t actually remember much about the game.
Which wasn’t the game’s fault, because that was quite lively. We had two teams whose approach to the game very much mirrors our own: get it down and pass it. As it worked out Ipswich looked the better of the two teams, but Saints had their moments too.
This Southampton team could have been a contender. Recent alumni include our own Chris Baird, but also the likes of Theo Walcott, Gareth Bale and Kenwyne Jones. Dan pointed out that the last three Championship top scorers have all recently been Saints players. I’m thinking Kevin Phillips, Ricardo Fuller perhaps… who would the other be? Anyway, these players have slipped through their hands and now almost the entire team is made up of teenagers or young twenty somethings. It’s an interesting predicament in that all of the players’ destinies are uncertain, they could amount to anything, and there’s something nice about seeing young players given a chance.
Against that, without some leadership out there the lack of ingrained good habits, of defensive shape, of any kind of presence, really can hold a team back. So that’s Southampton, young, gifted, and extremely vulnerable.
But they did take an early lead. The ball was passed around beautifully, Andrew Surman cut in from the left and fizzed a right footed drive along the floor and into the corner of Richard Wright’s net. So far so good. Ipswich are a good team though, and climbed back into the match quickly. Their passing was good, their defence much more organised than Southampton’s, and soon it seemed that there would eventually only be one winner. Our man Moritz Volz played a part in the equaliser, his surging run ending with a clever layoff to an overlapping midfielder, and the ensuing cross should have resulted in a goal. Saints couldn’t clear though despite several opportunities to do so, and Owen Garvan, one for the future, rammed home an equaliser.
At this point Ipswich took control. Their passing and overall shape was too much for Southampton, whose defence was let off twice by an over zealous safety-first linesman. Good saves, narrow escapes, pressure piling on. It continued into the second half, and eventually Ipswich broke through, Alan Quinn heading home from a good cross by Volzy. Saints looked ripe for a mauling, but to their credit threw on some attacking players and scrambled an equaliser with 20 minutes left. This shocked Ipswich back into life, but a winner wasn’t found and 2-2 just about suited everyone involved.
Championship life must be quite hard for teams like Southampton. A 30,000 stadium doesn’t look so good half-full (15,000 were there last night), and there are already rumours that Adam Lallana, their gifted young midfielder, could be going to Fulham in January. If they sell their best youngsters so fast, what then? Teams can’t continue to play with untried teenagers, not without some guidance and know-how to help them along. There’s the nucleus of a nice side there at the moment, but it looks about three years from maturity, and lacks 3-4 good players.
Lallana, incidentally, looks like he could be a Roy Hodgson type. He’s technically able, one of those players for whom a first touch is never an issue, the ball comes, he’s in control. His passing wasn’t as quick as Fulham’s, but that’s not unexpected because that’s how we play. He’ll run with it, and looks quite adept at so doing, but isn’t especially quick so wouldn’t be a natural wide player. I could see Roy turning him into something pretty handy.
Volzy played soundly. Right backs aren’t always in the best position to influence games but Ipswich will be glad to have him there. He does what he’s meant to do, takes care of business, then, if it’s on, joins the attack. He worked hard and fits in well with the team’s style of play, was instrumental in the build up to the first goal, and directly created the second, so you can’t really argue with that can you?
Things
Great stuff from David Conn. Thanks to Mart for the link.
Also worth noting: Bobby Charlton has a new book out about his England career, and in it - as is often the case with these books - he selects an England XI to face a Rest of The World team. In his England team is Johnny Haynes. So that’s nice.
Remember, you can pick up the Johnny Haynes book at Crockatt & Powell on the Fulham Road. There’s a book turf war starting down there, incidentally, as millionaire book chain owner James Daunt opens a rival store just over the road from Matt and Adam this week. Support the boys, buy your books at C & P.
I had something else to say but I’ve forgotten what it was.
