PART ONE - TELLING A STORY
Who's To Blame?
The question was (and will be) were Man City rubbish, or were Burnley really good? Well, let's break it down. If Man City are good, and Burnley are good, Man City wins. Man City must be bad before Burnley winning becomes a plausible outcome. So, Man City must have been bad. How good Burnley have to be depends on two things - how far off it Man City are, and 'other factors'. Yeah, that nice vague set of variables that are pretty impossible to put a value on. Will it be a deflection, a shitty offside call, an appalling red card or just a dodgy bounce?
Putting it Together...
In seeking to produce sense you'll try and stick two clauses together. If Man City were crap, you need something that comes before this (a cause). You need to be able to make sense of this crapness, so the crapness needs an explanation (prefferably a simple one). If Man City play like you expect, then no explanation is needed - that's Man City just being Man City. But Man City performed contrary to said explanation, please feel free to try and explain why...
Your Options
You might want to blame Manuel Pellegrini, but what is he really in charge of? He tells them how to play. If their playing style doesn't work, that's his error (sort of). He also needs to retain the confidence and belief of the players, so that they will confidently do what he says and trust his judgement, and therefore play his way. He doesn't seem to have lost this belief, not obviously. But he got the style wrong, and he didn't change it. What about transfers? What about bringing the right players in to begin with, giving himself the right tools to work with? Well, he's got flops knocking around all over the place - but the real problem is the hit-and-miss, slapdash approach to flinging a squad together. Silva compliments Aguero, but Dzeko doesn't fit with them at all, Dzeko would be better as a target man for a counter-attacking team. Then you have Navas who just innocuously runs up and down in straight lines, and then there's Silva's position, out wide, where he can fail to consistently affect the game and also doesn't protect his full-back at all. There's Fernandinho and Toure, both whom can tackle, but what are their primary roles? On Football Manager your centre midfield needs four things to work - a creator, a holder, an aggressor, and a runner - what does Man City's midfield have? I don't think either of them is creating, nobody is holding, the other roles are vaguely split between the two. So there are tactical problems, and personnel issues, and we can blame Pellegrini partially for one and largely for the other - there are long-term and short-term causes. But, they still win most of their games. Even with these issues, it's usually still not enough to halt City.
Other Factors
Well, let's be honest, George Boyd hits one in a million like that. It so happens that this one smashes into the back of the net, and it's a real beautiful strike. But it wasn't tactical genius from Dyche, if you were thinking of blaming him for the result. He was responsible for Burnley's compact approach, but Dyche was only indirectly responsible for the goal. His involvement extended to keeping Boyd out there long enough to get it. A tame free-kick is flung in, and Kompany happens to get there, happens to head it to Boyd, he happens to hit a beauty. If that comes back off the post, the game probably ends a draw - no-one is having good chances up to that stage. But Pellegrini wasn't at fault for that goal. He might've been partially at fault for poor general play. But then again, as we've said, his tactics usually get the job done. Since this is the case, do we have to look at the individuals? Sergio Aguero didn't seem to be at the races, Dzeko was totally anonymous, Bony spurned the only chance he got. Pellegrini can't force them to play the way he wants them to play, he just sends them out there. But what if it's competition neglect? What if he's totally failed to account for Burnley's strengths? To adjust to their approach?
So, Your Choices So Far...
Pellegrini, for a number of reasons. Sean Dyche (sort of). Luck. Competition Neglect. Which is it?
PART TWO - WYSIATI
Who Watched the Madrid Game in Midweek?
It was quite amazing, and fairly similar, in that one team had all the talent. So, to begin with, Madrid must have sucked quite a lot, and in fact they sucked a whole freaking load. But there is always one person, one factor that people want to hold over the others - (was it that Burnley were crap, or City were good?) - well, it has to have been both. Were Madrid crap, or were Schalke amazing? Madrid were awful, Schalke didn't actually have to be that good, and had they been better, they would've scored more and gone through. With an average crop of players they came up against a team in crisis.
The Madrid Conundrum...
Here's an approximate list of everything that's been blamed for Madrid's current malaise
Carlo Ancelotti (relaxed management style, tactical mistakes/tweaks), Gareth Bale (failure to settle, lack of confidence, lack of ingratiation with teammates), Ronaldo winning the Ballon d'Or, absence of Sergio Ramos, disastrous form of the hapless calamity that is Iker Cassilas, Luka Modric's lack of match fitness, the lack of a holding midfielder, the chairman, Ronaldo throwing a moody, and the Illuminati.
Which Do You Like Best?
Let's take Carlo - he didn't bag La Liga last season, but he took home the Champions League, he led them to a run of 22 consecutive wins this season - but suddenly his leniency on the players has turned them into a bunch of incompetent twits? He has moved things around recently, but he can't surely have gone from an all-conquering system to one which forces Bale to be anonymous and Toni Kroos to become about as useful as a telephone box in centre-mid. Cassilas sucked all the way through the 22 game run, Modric has been missing for a long while, Ronaldo still found the net twice on Tuesday, and they haven't lost or gained anyone (apart from innocuous Brazilians and Norwegian twelve-year-olds) in January, so the squad is still in tact.
Err...
Now imagine that a situation arises in which the squad needs a bit of discipline (which Ancelotti doesn't provide), and Bale begins to drain of confidence (the media get on his back, and his being an important part of the attack this is obviously an issue), Ronaldo takes his eye off the ball a little at roughly the same time, the defence struggles in Ramos' absence, thereby exposing Iker Cassilas (who falls flat on his arse in the face of everything that comes his way - but whose awful collapse in form was masked previously by their potent attack, which forced oppositions to curb their attacking enthusiasm to protect the goal), with the consequence that points are lost and vital confidence is sapped, and the Illuminati keep doing Illuminati type shit. Take all of these factors together (problems at both ends and in the dugout), and you get an explanation for the disgraceful home display against a team that is near enough the equal of West Ham. You're welcome to say one factor causes another, but they're all just things that happened. Possibilities that became realities.
What We Don't Know
Iker Cassilas' sucky form has been blamed on his becoming a father, and it might have been a factor (it almost certainly wasn't, he's sucked for a long time before he became Papa Iker), it could be all sorts of things - who knows what his mental state is really like? Who knows if the problem is really mental or physical? A fully qualified shrink couldn't tell you conclusively what's happened to him, and yet we're totally at ease with throwing our guesses into the ring. Who knows if there's anything wrong with Ronaldo at all? How can Bale failing to integrate suddenly be a problem after twenty-odd months at the club? Think of everything we don't know about Gareth Bale's universe. We're trying to stick a story together with fragments, using the small bits of info we do have and ignoring all that we don't know. We know almost nothing about Gareth Bale's life. However, we, as human beings, are super talented as whacking together believable, coherent stories with fragments of info, as I shall now demonstrate...
Read the Following Description...
You are assessing the suitability of this random guy I just invented, called Jim, for a management position. Read the following description, and use the space provided to evaluate the candidate...
Jim is a very, very nice guy. He is authoritative, intelligent, and respected...
________________________
Now answer the follow-up question...
HOW IS THAT ENOUGH INFORMATION?
I might've cut out another sentence that came after. I could've said 'intelligent, and respected, although he is a paranoid schizophrenic, who likes biting and traipses blood around the office - oh, and don't let him near the scissors'.
Your Knowledge has Limits, but You Usually Have to Tell it as Much
You don't know all you think you know, and also often don't realise you don't know enough. It's called What You See Is All There Is (WYSIATI); the pervasive tendency to ignore what you don't know, and settle for working only with what you do. You go by the WYSIATI principle when you evaluate Jim's credentials on a very brief account of his personality. You go by it when you think you know why Madrid are in freefall, when in fact, you know alarmingly little, and what you do know is secondary information gathered probably from a range of sources, and often a degree of what you know will either be fabricated or exaggerated. I honestly can't imagine a world in which that information would make it to you without suffering some distortion along the way. And this is another problem - you don't know what the reality is, where the distortion took place, so you can't evaluate the information with this in mind, you can only go on what you see. What You See Is, let's just say, All You've Got. Shame is, it's not really good enough when what you're trying to do is come up with an explanation which is right (part 1 hopefully showed how difficult this is), and which is suitably informed (part 2 hopefully showed you it usually isn't).
