The Numbers Games by Chris Anderson & David Sally

Author:Chris Anderson & David Sally
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group, USA
Published: 2013-07-21T16:00:00+00:00

In the Dugout: Building Teams, Managing Clubs

8.

O! Why a Soccer Team Is Like the Space Shuttle

A team that commits errors in no more than 15 to 18 percent of its actions is unbeatable.

Valeriy Lobanovskyi1

A battalion is made up of individuals, the least important of whom may chance to delay things or somehow make them go wrong.

Carl von Clausewitz

No single game in world soccer, the spiel runs, is worth as much money as the Championship play-off final at Wembley. Two teams from English soccer’s second tier face each other in a winner-takes-all game for the final available slot in the Premier League. The total prize for the side that claims victory and promotion to the richest league in the world is worth around £90 million in television revenue, merchandising income and ticket sales. The new TV contracts signed by the Premier League may increase this figure to as much as £120 million.

The play-off final is not the sort of occasion in which you want to find your worst player is also your most significant.

Sadly, that’s just what happened on 30 May 2011, when Reading and Swansea met for the right to claim a spot in the Premier League. This should have been a game in which one player’s brilliance stole the show, making him a hero. Instead, it was a game when Zurab Khizanishvili, Reading’s Georgian central defender, turned into a villain. A soccer team is only as strong as its weakest link. And Khizanishvili, that day, was a very weak link indeed.

Everything that could go wrong did go wrong. Chris Ryan, a writer for Grantland, was there that day, sitting among the increasingly exasperated Reading supporters. First, he wrote, they saw Khizanishvili get booked for fouling Fabio Borini, the Swansea striker. Then, in the twentieth minute, he bundled over Nathan Dyer, giving Scott Sinclair the chance to score from the penalty spot. Two minutes later, he failed to stop Dyer crossing for Sinclair to score his second.

That was not it. Before the first half had finished, the hapless Georgian had accidentally deflected yet another Dyer cross into the path of Stephen Dobbie, who duly gave Swansea what appeared to be an insurmountable lead.

“All around it was burst blood vessels, crying children and absolutely searing profanity and rage,” wrote Ryan of the Reading fans’ reaction. “It was basically several thousand people from Reading reenacting the scene in Goodfellas when Ray Liotta finds out Lorraine Bracco just flushed all of his cocaine down the toilet. ‘Zurab! Why did you do that!?’ Reading were 3–0 down after thirty-nine minutes.”2

Brian McDermott’s team did all they could in the second half to rectify Khizanishvili’s forty-five minutes of horror. They scored twice in quick succession and might have hauled Swansea back until the Welsh team scored a fourth and settled the game in the seventy-ninth minute.

Valeriy Lobanovskyi, the legendary coach of Dynamo Kiev, would have been appalled by what he saw. To Lobanovskyi, a team’s goal was to make mistakes in no more than 18 percent of all of its players’ actions.

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