On Sean Dyche

Sean Dyche has very much flown under the radar this season but I really think he is a potential star manager of the future. Burnley have looked well organized every time I've seen them play and this has been reflected in their results. They've only had two heavy defeats all season, 4-0 and 3-0 against West Brom and Arsenal respectively, surprising for a team which have just come up from the play-offs.

Burnley are in the relegation zone at the moment, but have by no means disgraced themselves this season. They are punching well above their weight against teams with far greater financial resources.

He also conducts himself very impressively in interviews. See below (half way down the page) where he calmly and rationally analyses some of the incidents from the recent Chelsea - Burnley game. He doesn't rise to Mourinho's bait, he doesn't try to influence referees, he speaks articulately and coherently. I am impressed and I have respect for him.

https://uk.eurosport.yahoo.com/blogs/paul-parker/chelsea-will-never-be-champions-off-the-pitch-with-jose-mourinho-in-charge-132242575.html

Contrast Dyche's performance here with Mourinho's shrill ranting and tell me who's more likable and who you have more respect for.

As an aside, I am completely fed up with Mourinho now, he's an attention seeker and I agree with Paul Parker that he doesn't try to protect his players at all but makes it all about himself. I've lost respect for him. I'm tired of him complaining all the time and I'm tired of Chelsea's dirty little tricks (e.g. surrounding the referee etc) they do every single game. I hope he gets fired from Chelsea because he's a cancer inside the body of English football. 

Back to Dyche, I hope Burnley stay up and I hope he gets a chance to establish himself as a top manager. From the evidence so far he deserves the opportunity to manage a big team.

Sean Dyche as the next England manager, anyone?

On Form

A classic study by the psychologists Tversky, Gillovich and Valone (1985) on 'hot hands' in basketball is still as relevant to sports today at it was 30 years ago.

In the study, the researchers analyzed thousands of basketball matches and concluded that 'hot hands', whereby a player is said to be 'hot' if he sinks three or four baskets in a row, is just a cognitive illusion, a trick caused by our brain's compulsion to try to see patterns in everything and to attach causal factors to those patterns, even when there is no good reason for doing so. Psychologists call this the local representativeness heuristic.

In fact, the players didn't do anything differently in terms of movement or technique when they had 'hot hands' than when they didn't. Sinking four baskets in a row is just a random act of chance for a top player, there is no causal effect. Although some basketball players (and some teams) are clearly better than others, this can only be demonstrated over the long-term (I.e. only when a large statistical sample is available).

But what's all this got to do with the Premier League? Let me explain.

Say your favourite team achieves the following sequence of results.

WWWLLL

A typical pundit or fan would say that the team were on form for the first three games but not on form for the last three. They would put it down to some problem with the tactics, or the fact that a certain player is (or is not) playing. They may also go further and hail the manager as a genius if he wins three games in a row, and then condemn him as overrated, out of his depth, or someone who has 'taken the club as far as he can' if he loses three in a row. 

But now consider this sequence:

WLLWLW

A typical fan or pundit would say that this team hasn't been either particularly in or out of form. The BBC pundit Mark Lawrenson would say that their 'form has been mixed'.

But the statistical probability of either sets of results happening is exactly the same. The spread of the results is completely random. A team can win or lose several consecutive matches completely by chance, by a mere statistical fluke. Similarly, a player who scores 20 goals in a season might score in six games in a row completely by chance; he's not on form but it's just the natural spread of random results. Therefore form does not really exist at all here. Our minds are simply tricking us by seeing statistical patterns and attaching causal factors to those patterns which are actually completely unjustified.

Fans and pundits following the Premier League fall for this trick far too often.  They say that a striker who doesn't score for a while is experiencing 'a goal drought' rather than just acknowledging that this will happen sometimes in a natural spread of random results. Worse, if a team experiences a few bad results in a row we say the manager is overrated and should be fired, even though he achieved excellent results in the past (think Brendon Rodgers, Alan Pardew and the clowns who wanted them fired earlier this season). We really should be judging managers on a season-by-season basis (i.e. a sufficiently large statistical sample) not on an arbitrarily selected number if matches. Radomness plays a far greater role in sports than we like to acknowledge.

Postscript

The full hot hands study can be read here:

http://cs.bc.edu/~straubin/cs244-2015/hothands.pdf

On Harry Kane

Harry Kane is obviously the main man at Tottenham now in the same manner that Gareth Bale once was. He is also seemingly a shoe-in for Young Player of the Year in May, and for a place in the England starting line-up in March. But how good could he actually end up being?

Kane has scored 23 goals in 35 games this year, better than Ronaldo (23 in 53 games)  and Bale (11 in 41 games) and almost as good as Messi (38 in 51 games) at the same age. It's also worth pointing out that Gareth Bale's best season total for Spurs was 26 which Kane is well on course to eclipse already.

Of course stats don't tell the whole story by any means; Kane does not seem to (yet) have the ability to do truly spectacular things on the pitch like the aforementioned players do on a regular basis. And we don't know much about him off the pitch yet either. Truly great players have a persona of some sort (e.g. Cantona, a philosopher with a nasty streak; Henry, a cool guy and a gentleman ; Beckham, a Hollywood star; Messi, quiet and shy etc). That is why someone like Alan Shearer isn't up with those players, he scored a lot of goals but he's a boring bastard. 

In terms of his playing style, a friend recently compared Kane to 90s footballer Teddy Sheringham. I reckon that's rubbish because Kane has pace whereas Sheringham was known for being very slow. I also think that Kane is going to be a better player than Sheringham ever was. No, I think a more apt comparison might be Gabriel Batistuta (an Argentine striker who played for Fiorentina in Italy in the 1990s) in the way he drops deep to pick up the ball and run at defenders and in his incredible shooting accuracy. And that is high praise indeed because Batistuta was one of the great players of his era.

In terms of England, I don't think Kane is going to be able to do very much, unfortunately. Football is a team game first and foremost and it doesn't matter how good our strikers are, (Rooney and Welbeck actually have excellent scoring records for England already) we are lacking in too many other areas. England have one of the best defensive partnerships in the world in Terry and Cahill, of course. But the former doesn't want to play for England because he has been vilified by our idiotic fans and morally bankrupt media. 

Harry Kane is obviously going to be the Premier League's next big thing. I hope he's also going to be England's next big thing, but we need to change the way we treat our players if we are going to ever have a successful team again.

How much do you know?

Instead of a prose blog this week I have created a quiz based on the transfer window and other events in football this week. Check it out below (should work on all devices).



file:///C:/Users/User/Documents/Tom/footballquiz(1).htm


One last thing, I'm certain that Harry Redknapp wouldn't have quit QPR had they been fighting for a Champions League place rather than against relegation. The guy has no loyalty or integrity at all.

Just sayin'