Reading Football Club manager Steve Coppell was being criticised for fielding a weakened team against Manchester United in the Fifth Round FA Cup replay Tuesday, devaluing the competition in pursuit of League ambitions and a place in European competition (a good source of extra cash).

It would seem to be symptomatic of the British disease of short-termism that he should face these brickbats. Anyone watching the first 20 minutes of the game would have agreed the team was below par, as Reading quickly conceded three goals. In the end, the result was 3-2 to the League leader, which also was not at full strength. But the quality of the home team was certainly vindicated, even if its early match strategy was not.

But competition is not just about one game. Confidence and success are threaded together. Overburden too few players with responsibility for carrying all the hopes of fans, particularly as a team becomes more successful, and that success may be short-lived. Rest and recovery are central to sustained success.

The low point-scoring value of a single goal makes football a particularly chancey game. So it may well pay to take a risk with a weaker team sometimes anyway. This is why football is more exciting according to statisticians. It produces more reversals of fortune.

But fans are a bit like investors. And club chairmen very definitely are. Losing is painful. This works against the hapless manager who needs time to build a long-term strategy, and may explain why key players are fielded too often, only to compound team weakness when they become re-injured.

Coppell seems to be a very tactical manager in any event. The Reading team compensates for its relative weakness against “super clubs” by aggressive practising of set-piece plays. In that respect, he creates a lot of his own luck. Hats off to him. He also has a degree in economics . As comedian Harry Hill would say: “what are the chances of that happenin’?”

Arthur Newton is not a figure many will have heard of, not even committed runners. But Newton is the father of modern endurance training method.

Born in 1883, Newton was a veteran of the First World War when he took up running seriously, aged 38. He won the 1923 South African 55-mile Comrades marathon, beating the existing record by two hours – this is regarded by experts as one of the greatest athletic feats of all time. During his running career he held nearly all the major distance records, including the 100 miles between Bath and London. His first Comrades win in 1922 was after just 20 weeks of training from his first painful two-miler.

This is a story of redemption and a man seeking reparation. Newton was an early example of someone who used his sport for political ends. He had returned to his South African farmstead from serving as a dispatch rider in the British Army, only to find the government had neglected his property in his absence. He believed that amateur athletics was a uniquely noble activity, one that could not fail to inspire sympathy for his cause.

For those of us who run for charity, the motivation is not dissimilar. Indeed, many take on the marathon following the death or illness of a loved-one, or as a means of overcoming some other life challenge as a statement of emotional and financial support to the organisations that have provided succour to us, our loved ones, or others whose plight has moved us.

By the 1950s the full value of his training methods was realised with the appearance of the great age of endurance running. What he understood in the 1920s was that you needed to do a lot of mileage, and most of it slowly, building speed and distance with small incremental steps. Indeed, his early training involved a lot of walking. Those first two miles caused him a lot of discomfort – he could not run for several days afterward, so he walked instead.

Newton’s approach was to develop what physiologists call “running economy” – something I’ve realised my own training has not yet established. My maximal test at the University of Bath highlighted just this. While I have focused mostly on the VO2 Max, which is above average, my report was much more critical of how well I use that capacity over distance. Because I have not trained slowly enough I have below average economy. Hopefully, as the miles pile on that will improve.
Resting Heart Rate 46

Weight 71.5 kg

Mood

No exercise, insufficient time.

Bath University sports scientist and physicist Ken Bray noted recently in a talk about penalty shootouts that in the 2006 World Cup Owen Hargeaves was notable not just for being the only England player to score from the spot in the quarter- final shootout against Portugal. He also maintains that Hargreaves kick was the only properly taken kick among the England attempts.

Bray attributed this to Hargreaves playing for a German club (Bayern Munich) where such things are practiced. Bray says while penalty shootouts appear to many fans to be a lottery, they should in fact be a pure skill-based exercise. Given their predominance as a means to settling tied international tournaments, only by practice can teams hope to avoid chance outcomes and win.

There has been a widespread belief among many pundits in the UK that a professional footballer should not need to practice penalties. Bray argues, based on time of goalie reaction and various risk factors, it is best to aim for a slightly elevated kick wide to the right or left of the goalkeeper. It should take not much effort to perfect such a kick, but aiming in this zone removes the chance of goalie interception. The Germans, and Hargreaves, practice this. The rest of the England team, and some others don’t, leading to randomness. The Times, in an article today quotes England coach McClaren describing Hargreaves thus:-

“We need him,” McClaren said. “I always remember the first time he played in a World Cup warm-up match [in 2002] and Owen wanted me after the game to get the video out and go through it with him. That was very unusual. Most players you have to drag in. I thought, ‘This is a different breed, a different type of player here, a different mentality.’”

Continue reading ‘Hargreaves’ studiousness “not football”?’

There is a great book by Nassim Nicholas Taleb called Fooled by Randomness, which examines the role of luck in all areas of life, particularly business and investing.

Taleb is a professor of mathematics and a derivatives trader. Not much to do with sport. But his business is complexity. There is something in statistics called “survivorship bias”. There is a danger that what we measure excludes those that have fallen by the wayside, distorting our view of the world.

Sport is a bit like that when it comes to injury and overtraining. The winner is the best on the day, and not necessarily the best over time. What we certainly don’t see at all are the no-shows, the non-runners, the might-have-beens. Imagine England’s rugby performance over the past few years if Jonny Wilkinson had not been injured.

Taleb is a fitness fanatic and keen cyclist. He says he is not interested in competitive sports, so he does not offer much to help an athlete understand success, except to offer the proverbial observation that a baseball hitter is normally cursed when he appears on the front of Sports Illustrated as it is normally followed by a reversal in fortune. (Mathematically, the previous winning streak was in fact an unsustainable run of luck).

In competitive sport, luck is not very likely to take an average athlete to a gold medal. But bad luck will certainly remove good prospects from the population of potential winners. Reducing that component of luck is what athletes strive for. In my own more modest marathon ambitions, I’m trying to do the same. Except there is not any pressure to win, just a pressure to turn up. That is not a small pressure, and if you are raising money for a charity, that pressure builds the nearer you get to the day. I ran my first marathon injured and while still recovering from a virus, dangerously toughing it out so as not to let down those who’d sponsored me.

Continue reading ‘luck, latent talent and training’