by AG7 » Wed May 16, 2012 11:00 pm
Whoever needs to, needs to give me the 'start thread' permissions pls:
Here's a wonderful piece coming in tomorrow's Guardian.
Mancini and Fergie mind games guff is just being wise after the event
Those extraordinary last five minutes of the Premier League season when Manchester City wrested the title from United should spare us any belief in the importance of cod psychology
Did football’s wiliest double agent find his match on the big day?
Marina Hyde
The Guardian
Wherever you stand on this Premier League season's extraordinary final minutes, I hope we can all agree that the result spared us yet another shameless reversal in the great "mind games" analysis. What a switchback ride we've been on this year. Roberto Mancini conceded the league, but didn't really, then Sir Alex Ferguson demonstrated to him that he had unwittingly conceded the league, but didn't really, and on it went … And at every turn you couldn't move for pundits explaining how each move was a plotted and calculated feint, as opposed to being a cocktail of almost unquantifiable variables and things managers have said in obliging response to hacks who have pitched up at a press conference with a shopping list of lines they'd like to take out of it. Please don't even start me on the rent-a-quote psychologists, who guffed things like "the die has been well and truly cast …"
No, as Sunday's dramas unfolded, I wailed that I genuinely couldn't tolerate a single further "mind games" analysis. But had Manchester City lived down to the expectations of the fans shown crying in the Etihad – when the best or narrowly second-best side in the league were drawing 1-1 with a 10-man Queens Park Rangers, with over 30 minutes left to play – then that is what we'd have got.
It would all have been Ferguson's meticulously planned masterstroke, with City's collapse the direct and entirely predictable result of another textbook operation by football's wiliest double agent. Or triple agent. Or octuple agent – one loses track. Serious analysis would have been given to the so-called key moments and staging posts in Fergie's sensationally victorious psychological game, where Mancini's callowness would have been placed in unfortunate counterpoint. Unhelpful data would have been ignored. I'd have gone back to those rent-a-quote psychologists, and you can bet they'd have had some handy reverse-ferret position all ready to go. "Aha!" they'd have crowed. "But the casting of the die itself is an act of tactical naivety. The ultimate mind games practitioner dwells in the psychological spaces beyond the die – AND SO IT HAS PROVED."
Yet I'm afraid this is all the most arrant bollocks. If that reading is a little too steeped in psychoanalytical technicalese for your tastes, we could deploy a phrase along the lines of "correlated not causal". But we may just as well reprint a bit of unaffected wisdom from Martin O'Neill, who a few weeks ago offered a timely reminder that football in this country is largely "analysed" retroactively through the lens of the result.
"All the talk of mind games makes me laugh, they really do," reflected O'Neill, who went on to observe that the simple weight of history would be a more significant factor for City. Reflecting on Kevin Keegan's 1996 "I would love it" TV interview, O'Neill pointed out: "They [Newcastle] had that weight of history too. That is supposedly the best example of mind games you could come up with, but what if Newcastle had won the league that season? We'd be saying that was the worst example; they'd have been saying: 'Thanks Alex, that was the best motivation possible.' It only became clever once the results were known at the end of the season."
Oh Martin, don't let daylight in on cod psychology! Alas, it says something about the degree to which we have tumbled down the rabbit hole that people are far more likely to believe that the latter reflection was O'Neill entering the mind games himself, perhaps working as a secret agent for Ferguson. Then again, perhaps he was actually working as a covert operative for Mancini – because the thing about the mind games narrative, as any rational student of it knows, is that it can be shaped to fit almost any set of events. As Arsène Wenger recently observed: "When you lose they think you lost the mind games, and when you win they say you won the mind games, but I am not completely sure that it has a massive influence on the players."
Well quite. And as such a determinedly retroactive way of looking at things, the "mind games" narrative tells us nothing about football while it is actually happening. It is merely another poignant attempt to impose simplistic order on something fantastically complex. Without getting bogged down in amateur chaos theory, the relative difficulty of scoring goals makes football one of the sports in which it is most eminently possible to produce results that do not reflect the run of play and the comparative skill of the two sides on the day. Consider Manchester United's fabled evening at the Camp Nou in 1999. If you can hack your way through the dense forest of latterly imposed cobblers to the sleeping princess of actuality that lies therein – if you can make it through that thicket of laboured metaphor, come to that – then you may recall United's win was bonkers.
In the intervening years, some myth-makers have sought to obscure this but the most rational reading emanated on the night from Ferguson himself. "Football," ran his famous anti-analysis, "bloody hell." I imagine he offered a similar verdict somewhere on Sunday, vocabulary adjusted for the fact he was off-camera – but then again, perhaps he just cackled knowingly. Maybe we'll meet back here in precisely one calendar year, when the mind games analysts are explaining that this tactical second place was in fact the unplayable psychological masterstroke that guaranteed next season's title.
