Cod Almighty | Diary
Data day life
26 April 2024
BOTB here. Firstly best wishes to my mate and sometime diarist Deano who has been unwell. Now the rest of it.
Season tickets. Next year. Prices frozen if bought before end of May. Other stuff. Read it yourself if you are that bothered.
Now for the rest of it. Breaking news is so irksome for your daily diarists.
The weather forecast told me it was going to be a largely dry morning, which explains why it’s been hammering to down since the moment I crawled out of bed. Myself and Paul Hudson, Look North’s diminutive weather non-forecaster, have a lot in common. Pretty much everything I predicted for this season, from overall league performance to the results of individual games, has been wrong. It’s a good job you don’t pay for my CA diaries, otherwise many of you would rightly be contacting your solicitors and asking for your money back.
My utter wrongness has been largely driven by emotion. I’m in an emotional relationship with the football club and I find it hard to be objective. I have spent the last couple of months being sure The Town Were Going Down, mainly because they are the team I support. Any neutral would have looked at the table and said that we were the favourites to escape the drop. But, would you believe it, here we are, a league team for at least another season and my emotion and magical thinking turn out to have no effect on the real world whatsoever.
Magical thinking – including superstitions – are of course central to the way most football fans see the world. If we beat somebody five nil it’s not because they had fourteen players out with the leprosy, but because I wore my blue shirt. The idea that supporters can influence a result is, I think, largely magical thinking with a kernel of truth. If we all turn up and support the team as opposed to booing and grumbling that will result in a victory, the thought goes. We are the twelfth man. In reality we support our team, and chant, and sing, because it feels good. How often, over the years, have you known a Blundell Park crowd in full hullabaloo mode and some arse playing for Cheltenham goes down the other end and sticks one in? I genuinely feel the biggest reason for a sizzling atmosphere is to help the ref see things our way. Who doesn’t want to be the most popular person in the ground? Refs are only human. I know, because I met one once.
Anyway, less of the half-baked footballing philosophy. Tomorrow we play Crawley, or Crawley as they like to be known (I’m sorry, it’s been a long season) who are on the cusp of a play-off place and need to beat us to make sure they are in the mixer. Who cares, though, eh? We can say goodbye to this Piers Morgan of a season and think about next season, by which time we will be entirely data driven and everything will be computerised and run by robots.
The trouble with data is of course that it comes in all possible different qualities. Perhaps it’s my past education as a fairly inept scientist, but the misuse of data and statistics is so rampant in society it frequently turns me into the stereotypical ‘old man yelling at cloud’ who is unable to open Facebook or glance at a newspaper without cartoon steam coming out of my ears.
My favourite is when someone says something doubles your chances without giving the background data. For example, they may say that if you are a fan of Leonard Cohen you are twice as likely to wear a hat as someone who isn’t. Now, for this to mean anything, you need to know how many people in society wear hats and how many are Leonard Cohen fans. Doubling the possibility could mean from 1 in a million to 2 in a million, or it could mean from 1 in 5 to 2 in 5, which is very different. This failure to grasp statistics in the media is so widespread that whenever I see ‘studies show’ or ‘statistics prove’ my first reaction is to say ‘oh yeah?’ Show me the data! How many variables are there? Have they all been accounted for? Basically, I’m a cynic.
Take a goalkeeper. He keeps 20 clean sheets in a season. That’s good. How good is the defence? How well does he get on with the centre-halves? Is there a personality clash with one of them? Is he happy in the area? Are his children at good schools? How is his confidence? How are his personal relationships? How is that old injury doing? Has he changed his diet? Does he have any personal trauma? Is the division he is in particularly poor this year? Etcetera etcetera.
To account for everything that might alter a player’s performance you need an awful lot of data and it needs to be analysed brilliantly. Why do some players have great times at some clubs and be hopeless at others? Why are some players brilliant for their club and terrible for England?
I still think the best way to judge players is to watch them. But then I am a twentieth century boy in a twenty first century world. And if I am proved wrong next season I will be delighted, and possibly start trusting data analysts and statisticians a little more, though I’ll draw the line at inviting them round for tea and biscuits. In the meantime, we’re all going on a summer holiday. No more defeats for a week or ten.
Hurrah! Go team Grimsby!