Cod Almighty | Diary

The points lost in the ether

29 June 2022

This close season, in a vague attempt to extract more juice out of Cod Almighty's 20th anniversary, we are inviting some of our past diarists to do a reprise. Today it is the (sadly one-off) return of Retro Diary.

As I get older I find that the balmy doldrums of the close season trigger a kind of annual review of my multifarious football-related neuroses, and I ponder whether they're actually doing me any good. Leeds, crap referees, Harry Pell, franchise football, time-wasting, people in the Main Stand who don't throw the ball back quickly enough when we're losing (or too quickly when we're winning), or have to go for a piss six times when you're sitting between them and the aisle. Pink boots with red socks, huddles, the inexplicable new flag that makes our elegant trawler look like something out of a gala on a village pond, free kicks in midfield which are taken sideways and then finish up going backwards. Very, very, very cold days. Are any of these things actually worth shortening your life for?

Football, after all, isn't a basic human need. It's put there, believe it or not, for pleasure. A heroic promotion like the one we've just seen certainly goes a long way to mitigating the frustration and reminds us why we suffer the gamut of football-related torture for, let's face it, the vast majority of the time. Knowing how frustrating football usually is, I still can't quite believe that those play-offs actually happened. Sometimes, just sometimes, football is really, really brilliant, isn't it.

I know I'm not alone in feeling that the momentum from that colossal effort could project us straight up to the right end of the division above. With this in mind, I'm already worried that we'll do our usual thing and set off far too cautiously and pay what looks a very ordinary division far too much respect. Which brings me to my biggest neurosis of all – one which I seem not to share with anyone else. It's been doing my head in for 40 years. Please, can someone help me out with this?

It's my assertion that nobody in football has ever really understood the mathematics of three points for a win. Once you've seen the truth of this, it can't be unseen. You can hear the error perpetuated in every manager's interview and see it in every league table. What the hell am I on about?

Draws. Draws are what I'm on about. Basically, they're not value for money. They're duff. They're not proper reward for what you've done on the pitch, and they depress your league position. Three points for a win was invented in 1981 by, believe it or not, iconic MOTD presenter Jimmy Hill, with the express objective of making draws unattractive. Yet 41 years later football still treats draws as an acceptable fall-back; a best-worst; a "not bad"; an "at least we didn't lose", even though they’re designed to drag you down. Town could piss division four just by understanding the maths. Not convinced? Time for an example - imagine the scene:

It's a damp November Saturday afternoon with the floodlights on, and two sets of clodhopping journeymen (let’s call them, say, Doncaster and Gillingham) are thrashing out a tedious 0-0. Much as they huff and puff, neither team can make a breakthrough. But then, with five minutes to go, the referee, fed up with the stultifying ineffectiveness on show, has a rare moment of clarity and blows his whistle, bringing the two captains together.

"Right", he says, "I'm going to give you a choice. You can either play out the last five minutes as normal, or we can toss a coin now for the three points".

Now, unless you’re a lunatic you're going to toss for the points. I mean blimey, 50-50 - lose and you lose one point; win and you gain two points. No bookie's ever going to give you value like that (and if they do, please tell me straight away). It's a mathematical no-brainer. Toss for it you wallies before somebody changes their mind.

But, and this is where it gets really odd, let's look at what actually happens. Both teams toil wearily on in the same ineffective manner until the ref blows for time. Nobody chucks the kitchen sink at it, the keeper doesn't pile up for corners, defence isn't forgotten in a frenzy of attacking abandon - nothing. Just more of the same, with one side struggling gamely to break through and the other hanging in there in the forlorn hope of a lucky break. Caginess is apparent on both sides. So - 0-0 it is, and an unused point floats off into the ether. When interviewed afterwards, the managers will say (and we've heard Hursty say this many times): "We couldn't make the breakthrough but as time went on it became important that we didn't lose the game."

WTF!!! Five minutes ago you thought it was a good idea to take a 50-50 risk of losing the game on the toss of a coin! Just give that a minute to sink in.

If Town had won half and lost half of last season's draws they would have had four more points. Chesterfield, who drew 14, would have had seven more points. Burnley would have finished above Leeds and not gone down. AFC Wimbledon, similarly, would have survived. I bet those teams wish they'd tossed for the points in each of those drawn games. Or, that they'd done the football equivalent of going wild at the death to make sure they forced a result, but didn't draw. Draws, mathematically, are really little more than a formalised short-changing of both teams.

So if you're drawing with five, or even ten minutes left, you should be chucking the dog, the frying pan and the sideboard at it, doing everything in your power to force a result of some kind. Imagine you need to win to go up, because for all you know you actually might, come spring (three points, after all, being worth the same in game one as in game 46). Perhaps pretending that penalties are looming would help? Actually, look what happened when they really were?

Now, you might say that if you're losing 2-0 with five minutes to go, a draw would be a good result. Well yes it would, but even after you've equalised, the best use of the final few kicks of the match is still to go mental and risk losing, assuming your chances of either winning or losing are the same.

Of course there'll be some unfortunate team somewhere that goes apeshit for the victory in the last five minutes of every dreary stalemate and loses them all. They'll finish with fewer points and the fans will most definitely not be chuffed. Well yes, but the principle is still good. Also, if it caught on and every team forced a result every time, the advantage would be lost. But currently, about a quarter of games finish in draws, which means whoever is first to understand that draws are to be avoided could really steal a march on the rest.

Every year at this time I fantasise that Town will be the first club to get their heads round this, abandon the curse of excessive caution and usher in a new era of high-scoring attacking football with a grand, points-laden flourish, albeit with a few last minute defeats along the way. It's not going to happen though, is it? Come May we'll look back at a final table, as we (or at least I) always do, and rue all those points which went to the ether without a fight.