In love with a lucky bounce
Maybe deep down chance is what we're into football for. Sure, we can talk about it being a sport where elite athletes compete to prove whose best. But we could also be honest and confess how much we love it when a ball smacks into his own goal off Harry Maguire's face.
It helps sometimes to pause and consider the possibility that everybody is just bluffing. That association football is a stupid, random game and that anyone who thinks they can control what happens in soccer is either an idiot, a trickster, or lucky.
Rugby football is in many ways a refinement, if what you want to test in sport is human skill, strength and ability. Picking up the ball brings it more under human control, holding it tight to the body and only releasing it for a carefully chosen pass subjects it to the competitors' mastery. It's shape and weight is attuned to carriage, fitting it into hands, limiting its scope to runaway when kicked or dropped.
The association rules version? Well, first of all, the ball is round and it's on the ground. Immediately the number of things that can happen to it outside of a player's intention are multiplied and hard to predict. There are differing grass lengths, different types, there are divots. The ball, already designed to roll, has been made lighter and lighter until the wind becomes a factor affecting everything from passing to shooting. In rugby, only the kicker has to worry about that, but in football, a sudden gust can throw a well-planned attacking or defensive move into disarray.
Rugby, with its limited movements and restricted variables, becomes a greater test of the players because it allows them to do what they mean to do and then see the results. Whereas in football, the untrammelled variables mean that as often as players are trying to control the ball, they're trying to control chance, too.
Once, when I was interviewing Howard Wilkinson about the bewildering game at Bramall Lane in 1992 when Leeds won the First Division title, he explained the job of a manager in terms of chance. "Analysts say that 35-50% of what happens in a game can be chance," he said. "Good managers try and make sure that they're at the 35% end, and not so good managers leave it to the fate of the gods and it's the 50% end. But then there are just games where, you just know. Despite everything you might think, try and do, that things are happening out there that are beyond your control."
It's the 35% end that has always fascinated me about that. You don't get many managers as astute as Howard Wilkinson. He knows football management inside out, every tedious detail. Routine preparation was his watchword, constant rehearsal. And yet, at its very best, he understands that more than a third of what happens on a football pitch is just down to chance, not will. And that's if you're good at the game.