Asking Questions

It was a simple question, asked in that bewildered tone Americans
often use when discussing football.
‘Why do they do that?’
Dave and I were watching Premier League highlights, and
something had caught his eye. Not a moment of dazzling skill, or
bewitching beauty, or even inept refereeing, but something
altogether more mundane. Dave was baffled, like countless central
defenders before him, by Rory Delap’s long throws.
Every single time Stoke City won a throw-in within hurling
distance of the opposition box, Delap would trot across to the
touchline, dry the ball with his shirt – or, when at home, with a
towel handily placed for that very purpose – and proceed to catapult
it into the box, over and over and over again.
To me, as a former goalkeeper, the benefits of Delap’s throws
were obvious. I explained it to Dave: Stoke had a decent team, but
one lacking a little in pace and even more in finesse. What they did
have, though, was height. So why not, when the ball goes out of
play, take the opportunity to create a chance out of nothing? Why
not cause a little havoc in your opponents’ ranks? It seemed to
work.
That did not sate Dave’s curiosity, though. It simply served to
make him ask the next logical question.
‘So why doesn’t everyone do it?’
The answer to that was equally obvious: not everyone has a Rory
Delap, someone capable of hurling the ball great distances with that
flat trajectory, like a skimmed stone, that panics defenders and
confuses goalkeepers.
Dave, himself a former baseball pitcher, tried another tack: ‘But
can’t you try and find one? Or make one of your players lift weights
and practise the javelin and the hammer?’
There was a problem with this. Yes, Dave’s questions, like those of
a persistently inquisitive child, were getting annoying; more
irritating still, I did not have a good answer.
‘You could play the game the way Stoke do,’ I countered, ‘if you
have a Delap and loads of tall central defenders. But it’s just not
very attractive. It’s not what you do unless you have to.’
‘Why?’ Dave responded, with crushing logic. ‘It seems to work for
them.’
And that was it. All I had left, like a frustrated parent, was one
word. ‘Because.’
Because there are some things you don’t want to do when playing
football. Because, even though a goal created by a long throw is
worth just as much as one from a flowing passing move, it’s almost
like it doesn’t count as much. Because, to a purist, they’re somehow
not quite as deserved.
But Dave’s endless questions – Why? Why? Why? – nagged at me.
If it works for Stoke, why don’t more teams do it? Who was right?
Stoke, who were responsible for almost a third of all the goalscoring
chances from throw-ins created in the Premier League that
year – or everyone else, who clearly felt they did not need, or did
not want, the long throw in their arsenal?
Why are there some things that are just ‘not done’?
Why is football played the way it is?
We attempted to answer these two very big questions by applying
our knowledge and skills – as a political economist in my case and a
behavioural economist in Dave’s – our discipline as social scientists,
our experiences as a goalkeeper and a baseball pitcher, and our love
for sports and for solving hard problems. The result rests in your
hands – a book about football and numbers.
Football has always been a numbers game: 1–1, 4–4–2, the big
number 9, the sacred number 10. That will not change and we don’t
ever want it to. But there is a ‘counters-reformation’ gathering pace
that may make another set of figures seem just as important: 2.66,
50/50, 53.4, <58<73<79, and 0 > 1 will all prove to be essential for
the future of football.
This is a book about football’s essences – goals, randomness,
tactics, attack and defence, possession, superstars and weak links,
development and training, red cards and substitutions, effective
leadership, and firing and hiring the manager – and the way these
relate to numbers.