Plagiarism, or the Desire to Attribute Causality?

The Plagiarism Theory
10.30am(ish) - I publish a final draft of my Arsenal "Competition Neglect" piece. 
And I do this...

@DTguardian is the Twitter thingymabob of Daniel Taylor, the Guardian's chief football writer, colleague of Amy Lawrence.
At 23.51 - more than a full two days after the Arsenal-Monaco tie, but just a short twelve hours after I publically sent a link to one of her colleagues, Amy Lawrence, who happens unsurprisingly to follow him on Twitter, published the following article - link here. 

Well, so what?
Well, so I noticed some similarities. In fact when I first read her article I went 'wow, this is eerily similar to what I wrote', and then I saw who wrote it, and I made a very very small leap. But what are the similarities? 
It's mainly the "Wenger's Tactical Theories are Woefully Outdated" passage that I'm bothered with. It makes mention to the Invincibles, as I did, and in fact every argument in the section appears in my article. She mentions the Invincibles, references competition neglect ("they only concentrated on themselves"), indeed the title of this section "Wenger's Tactical Theories are Woefully Outdated" is distinctively similar to "It's not like Arsene Wenger hasn't always done this". She then goes on (as I did) to contrast the Invincibles with the current crop, before focusing (as I did) on their risky defensive strategies. 
So, what's the essence of the Plagiarism Theory?
Well, this theory wonders if there aren't just a few too many coincidences. For those who are into that sort of thing, here's a list of them...
1) a link to my article was publically posted on Daniel Taylor's Twitter page. 
2) Amy Lawrence is a colleague and follower of Taylor. 
3) 12 hours after I published my article, Lawrence publishes one. 
4) This is an article she waited a full 48 hours after the game to publish. 
5) In her Guardian article from the previous day, the subject is not even broached.
6) Feel free to browse everything she's written for the Guardian in the last few years, so much of which has been about Arsenal, and let me know if you find these theories anywhere (I didn't). 
7) The content shows remarkable overlap. Now, I'm not saying two people can't have the same ideas - but for her to suddenly develop them now, after years of watching the evidence unfold? Suddenly, 12 hours after I publish, she's realised something she should have realised years ago. 
These 7 points are the essence of the Plagiarism Theory. 
the Causality Theory
One thing happens. Another (related) thing happens. It is very very tempting to infer that one caused the other. In fact, there is a very cogent evolutionary explanation for this tendency. It goes like this...
If Frank is dead in a clearing, is it better to think that a) it is just random, or b) tigers did it? Even if there is little evidence tigers did, it is better to be wary of tigers even if they aren't there. 
Likewise, it is safer to assume there is a virus going round, than to assume someone you know dropped dead by accident.
I wrote an article, Amy Lawrence wrote a related article. It is very very tempting to see that the two events are linked. They happened soon one after the other, this increases the temptation, it does not necessarily mean that the inference is valid, indeed only Amy Lawrence knows what inspired her to write that article. 
So...

What do you think?

There's nothing else to add. 

You can make your own minds up.

I'm off for a shower and a dump.

Competition Neglect - aka "where Arsenal are going wrong"

"DISMAL ARSENAL FLOUNDER AT HOME TO MONACO"

was just one of many negative headlines of this sort that referred to Wednesday nights Champions League debacle. I think you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone saying...

"YOU KNOW, I THINK THAT WENT WELL"
Who wasn't being totally sarcastic. 

The Background

Think back to November, when Arsenal hosted an even less highly esteemed side in the form of Belgian champions Anderlecht (who had not won in any of their previous 12 Champions League games). Having taken a 3-0 lead, Arsenal wound up carelessly conceding three late goals, giving Anderlecht a point and wrecking Arsenal's hopes of finishing first in the group. In the past four seasons (when they have faced Barcelona, Bayern Munchen - twice - and Milan) they have failed to win their group on three occasions, and have also failed to make it past the last-16. Indeed having won their group in 2011-2012, and having consequently drawn AC Milan, Arsenal travelled away for the first leg and contrived to suffer an ignominious 4-0 defeat, a deficit they ultimately couldn't recover in the return leg. Take into account the 6-0 loss suffered at Chelsea in March, the 5-1 reverse away at Liverpool a month earlier, the 8-2 to Manchester United a couple of seasons before that, and their recurring failure to make progress through the knockout stages of the Champions League, and you have a very distinctive pattern. This is a competition that, since taking over almost 20 years ago, Arsene Wenger has never won. 

Competition Neglect

Competition Neglect is an aspect of the general self-enhancing bias that affects all of us, it is both common and understandable. In essence, when a person is suffering from Competition Neglect they focus on what they know and want and are capable of, neglecting the plans and skills of others. If you think only of your strengths, and ignore the strengths of your opponent, you are exhibiting Competition Neglect. We are proposing that Competition Neglect from Arsene Wenger is the primary cause of this pattern of recurring disappointment. 

A Recurring Problem

If you look back at the Liverpool away fixture from last season, you see that Arsenal fielded a very attacking line-up when visiting the most prolific counter-attacking team in the division at that time. Against Chelsea the game was over in quarter of an hour as Arsenal were ripped apart. The way I see it, you could only overlook an attack of Sturridge, Sterling and Suarez, which is decimating teams left, right and centre, if you never take them into account in the first place. If you dismiss the opposition tactics, and send your team out to play the same way regardless, and don't reorganise when it isn't working (which Wenger noticeably doesn't - a persistent feature of Arsenal's tactical setup is its immunity to adapting based on distinctive features of developing situations), you leave yourself exposed. If you think of Arsenal's recurring disappointments in this way, they begin to make sense. It is not just that they keep failing, it is that they keep failing in the same way. 

The Invincibles

It's not like Arsene Wenger hasn't always done this. But it's different if you've got Vieira and Henry. You can keep playing your own way, you earn the right to play your own way, if the opposition is weaker than you. But if your protecting midfield player is the magnificently average Francois Coquelin, and your attacking talent is Danny Welbeck and Olivier Giroud, you can't expect to get away with it, and indeed, Arsenal clearly don't. Even when they finally did win silverware last season, it was a failure to take Hull's strengths into account that saw the game almost beyond them inside 10 minutes. 

Focusing on What You Want To Do

Arsene Wenger wants his teams to play football. He neglects the fact that Monaco don't want his team to play football. His team plays in the same way every game, without taking into consideration that the opposition will be expecting this. When was the last time you even got an inkling that Arsenal had a plan b, or that Arsene Wenger had even considered that they needed one? How often do they actually alter their strategy in any noticeable way? 

The Way Arsenal Play

To return to that Anderlecht game, Paul Merson opened the studio analysis of the tie by describing Arsenal as "tactically clueless". With the score at 3-0 Arsenal continued to throw players forward, with the consequence that the defence was left exposed to the counter attack, and the midfield players were too high up to get back effectively - as was the case for the second and third goals against Monaco, both of which resulted from breakaways when the defence was left exposed in an almost laughably incompetent manner. For the second goal, they were left with two back, and with one of them being Per Mertesacker, who is noted for his lack of explosive capabilities, it was essentially one back against a Monaco counter attack. In the end Koscielny was the only defender on the right side of the ball, with the midfield charging back ahead of him, leaving Berbatov enough time to pick his spot and bag a second away goal. There was a complete reckless disregard for Martial's pace on the break, or for Monaco's numbers and quality in attack. 
The Percentages
If you are calling a coin that is being tossed while it is in the air, and you do this enough times, and you always go with Heads, you will be right half the time. If you play the same way against every opposition, sometimes this will work, but sometimes it will not. This inflexibility equally explains Arsenal's consistent league positions - they have a squad that is good enough to win most games, but not enough to realistically challenge for the title. 

They Are Not Good Enough

This Arsenal team is not good enough to neglect the plans and skills of others. Their repeated failures, and their tactical "cluelessness", is plausibly explained by this deficiency. For those of you who want to look at the Man City game as evidence against this theory, I would point out that the players had to ask Arsene to adjust his tactics, and it worked. When he calls the shots, Arsenal falter, and they do it regularly. 

A VERY VERY BRIEF INTRO TO GUT FORECASTING

Yes, today is the day we finally talk about intuition. Yours is probably a lot less accurate than you would like to believe. Not wanting to labour this introductory paragraph, here's a 5-step guide that should give you a very very brief outline of why that is...

1. Recap of Availability

We won't waste a lot of time here. Remember how we said that it's about forming judgements based on cognitive ease ("the ease with which instances come to mind"), that's still true. Recency is highly valued, a memory will be more available if it is a memory of the weekend, rather than a memory of last month. We comfortably remember the details of Man City's 5-0 thrashing of Newcastle, whereas the 1-1 home draw with Hull from February 7th is much less available. Your gut probably said good things about Man City ahead of the Barca game, because the most available recent memory you have is of a surprisingly comfortable victory. You unwittingly ignore that the four results they achieved prior to the midweek win at Stoke in the game before last, were a 1-1 draw away at Everton, a 2-0 home loss against Arsenal, and back-to-back 1-1 draws away at Chelsea and at home to Hull City. To repeat, it's not your fault. You are designed to give much greater weight to recent events, in fact it would've taken deliberate searching of memory to even recall the Arsenal or Hull performances, and they probably feel as distant to you as they do to me. 

2. Involvement (what are the chances you'll think it through?)
When motivated to, we will carefully consider certain issues. When we lack the motivation of personal involvement, we are happy to rely first on instinct, and second on superficial cues (for details see Petty, Cacioppo & Goldman 1981). Are we that involved in a vague forecast of who will win out of Man City and Barca? Almost certainly not. In fact, as soon as we're asked;
"So, Billy, what do you think will happen tonight?"
We tend to find that an answer to the question bounces immediately into our brain, and this answer will be very seductive, and it will certainly feel valid. It's only when I remind you how quickly that answer appeared that you might realise it is not a proper consideration of all the available facts. Instead of sitting and considering the question, we're most of us pretty happy to go with whatever first comes into our brains, with some possible small amount of elaboration. If your brain instantly goes "Man City" three days after they hammered Newcastle, and Barca were beaten 1-0 at home by Malaga, then you are relying upon the bias of availability, rather than making a reasoned judgement. That you might be right is surely neither here nor there...

3. The Intervention of Confirmation Bias
Imagine instead of saying "City", you said "Brighton". You (a nameless individual) may have sat with me and watched Middlesbrough-Leeds at the weekend. We may both have had a very negative opinion of Leeds' playing style, and the dubious qualities of their hapless lone striker, Steve Morison, whose goal record this season will be initiated just as soon as he actually gets one. So, when forecasting their result in travelling to play a team that scored 4 goals at the weekend in winning at home, you may have weighed this off against your impressions of the Leeds performance, and come up with the conclusion that Brighton could be on course to get a hatful. How do you justify this prediction? Why do you even need to? Well, what if someone questions you? Immediately you'll seek substantiating evidence. Well, you focus on the fact they scored 4. You ignore their league position (which going into the game was 20th), and their failure to win in 4 league games before the weekend, and the fact Birmingham scored 3 in that match, and so only lost by 1. You also ignore that all of Brighton's goals came from a centre midfielder and a right-back. 
Likewise, if you back Barca, you play down the City 5-0 hammering at the weekend, and play up Barca's 10 consecutive wins with 34 goals scored prior to the Malaga catastrophe. The point is that you accept the bits that support your theory, and ignore or downplay the significance of stats or info that contradict it. That's not unreasonable, it is simply human.

4. Always Right, not really wrong at all
Imagine you did forecast a City victory, and now they've lost. To you the factors that affected the outcome have probably been officially recorded as unforeseeable. When reflecting on your wrongness, you will focus on the good fortune required for the Suarez opening goal, the disappointing display from the usually reliable (though recently erratic) Vincent Kompany, and the red card for Gael Clichy. All of which reduce the sense that you really made an unreasonable error. Now imagine you forecasted that comfortable Brighton win. You are a prescient, almighty psychic God (in fact, you probably already were), this outcome is just yet further evidence of your extraordinary genius. Even though you said it would be by a hatful, that doesn't matter, and you don't need to analyse the game itself for possible moments of good fortune, or the intervention of a dodgy ref. You were right, because you are great (or, of course, you were wrong, but that's hardly your fault). 

5. The Consequence of This Final Bias
It sustains an illusion - that you can accurately forecast football results. You can't. You couldn't have forecasted Gael Clichy's split second decision to jump in on Dani Alves, which halted City's march back into the match. You couldn't have forecasted the last minute Zabaleta lunge which cost a penalty, and you still couldn't have forecasted that Leo Messi (who for the last month and a half has comfortably eclipsed Cristiano Ronaldo as the games foremost talent) would miss, and even if you forecasted the Hart save, you could never have reasonably forecast Messi putting a rebound wide when it was palmed straight back down the middle to him. You couldn't have foreseen the Suarez flick bouncing back to him off Kompany for the first goal. You might've suspected Barca would dominate the chances, but you couldn't have guaranteed that they were going to take any of them, and at half-time most of us couldn't foresee a City fightback. The future is unknowable, and when it comes to football this unknowability factor seems to only go off and increase. Sometimes you are right, and because you take credit for that and deflect blame when you're wrong, you feed a misconception that you have forecasting prowess. So as soon as your gut says "Man City" you gain total confidence in that impression. You have systematically built up a mental representation of yourself as an oracle. But you aren't. You're just guessing. I think I'm an oracle, but my winnings and deposits into a Betfair account I've had running for almost five entire years now are, give or take a fiver here and there, pretty much exactly even. The money tells me I am right at a rate of chance, I tell myself that I am a prophetic prodigy with prodigious and unparalleled foresight.

So...
Just reconsider, if you think about your abilities to guess results the way I think about mine. You can't know what is going to happen - being right OR wrong involves a lot of luck. So many modifying events occur in a football match, you cannot foresee them all. You are not a prophetic prodigy with prodigious powers or foresight. But then you're not supposed to be. It is not the way the world works, it is not the way your brain works. You guess about football in a perfectly acceptable way, even if you don't want to accept it. Moderating your self-opinion, taking equal responsibility for successes and losses should help you also to moderate your confidence in your predictions, and the amount of money you are willing to back them with. Developing a healthy sense of my own shortcomings has allowed me personally to severely reduce my gambling expenses. If you want to do this as well, every time you go to place a bet or deposit cash into your Betfair account, tell yourself you've got a very decent chance of being wrong, and then save that money and get yourself an eclair.

A Deliberate Attempt to Deceive/It's Not a Dive 'cos Rooney Did It

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/football/31496270

First of all, we can all see that there is no contact. Let's just shake hands and agree that Thorsten Stuckmann does not touch Wayne Rooney at any moment in the event. What's amazing is that anyone thinks there is anything to debate here at all. 
So-Called Pundits Holding a So-Called Debate
Go to the clip, and listen carefully to what the "pundits" say : Lineker focuses on the "rash" challenge - which makes no contact with Wazza. Nev focuses on the same thing that Keown and Wilson focused on in commentary, that he "has to get out of the way", and goes on to say, remarkably, "If he left his leg there, that would've been a leg breaker"(for the record, we completely disagree with this assertion, unless it turns out Wazza's shins are made of biscuit), and that if he hadn't got out the way the keeper would've "snapped his leg" (which also would not have happened in the absence of shins crafted by McVitie's). Hodgson describes it as "just taking evasive action", Roy even describes the keeper as having "gone with both feet", which is actually an entirely fabricated detail consistent with his reading of the event, but absent in the true event.
Memory Errors
Our brains do not store precise images of events. Our brains store little faint snapshots, but what we actually think of as "recollection" is really "reconstruction" of our sense of what the event meant, and the actual details we do remember. It is not uncommon to distort a memory to include what seem like genuine details, which are in fact fabricated details which fit with the way the event was salient for us. For Roy, Wayne is an innocent party, so he fabricates a detail which supports this perspective. 
A Quick Lesson in Objectivity
Ask yourself this - if Luis Suarez or Eden Hazard or Diego Costa does what Wazza did, is it viewed the same? No, of course not. Are there any relevant external factors which could justify this? The answer to this question is also 'no'. 
Our Reading of the Event

Thorsten Stuckmann makes a sliding challenge. He makes no contact with Manchester United footballer Wayne Rooney. Wayne Rooney leaps forward into the air, and kicks his leg back. Wayne Rooney makes a deliberate attempt to simulate contact in the absence of actual contact. 
"English players don't dive"

You don't actually hear this phrase verbatim, but some hint to the underlying stereotype is very common. Like any stereotype, we will meet with occasional evidence which runs contrary to it. Take the Millerites, who gave up everything to follow William Miller's prediction for the end of the world, but did not let the simple, unfortunate fact of the world failing to actually end as evidence that their belief was wrong. This may not be a stereotype, but it shows the way we typically react to evidence that challenges our existing beliefs.
 What Do We Do? 

So, you are confronted with evidence - actual indisputable evidence - that an English footballer, Captain of the national team, Wayne Rooney no less (such an "English Footballer" that despite barely being in the game at all he can get on the BBC's three-man 'Man of the Match' shortlist), has done a definite dive. On the other hand, aren't all English players honest? It's now become salient for the parties recognised above to, rather than having to review the veracity of their beliefs, find a way to retain the image of Wayne Rooney as being a) a typical English player, and b) consequently honest. 
Let's Just Take a Moment
He may have to get out of the way, although we're not actually conceding that point, we don't think anything would've happened if he'd kept running at the same pace (slow it down; the left leg goes past Stuckmann, the right leg goes over him). Anyway, we'll let you have that. Let's say he did have to get out of the way. What are his options? He can a) do it the way any normal person would, or b) he can simulate the effects of contact. Interesting that the "honest" footballer, chooses option b. 
So, What Are We Saying?

If you've ever heard Wilson commentate, you'll know that he's of the conservative variety, and if you've ever heard Martin Keown talk, well, you'll know where we're going with this. Keown and Wilson, we're saying, share this popular stereotype "English players don't dive/are more honest" and are met with conflicting evidence. They have a choice. They can question the validity of the stereotype (an act which requires genuine mental effort and attention, some non-routine thinking), or they can interpret the evidence in a way which maintains the credibility of the stereotype (aka their present belief). If you've ever met people, you'll know the latter is a more popular route than the former, in fact one is almost ubiquitous, whereas the other is a rarity.  To maintain your present beliefs, you must find ways of creatively interpreting disconfirming evidence, and when the belief is a stereotype, where disconfirming evidence will inevitably abound, we are especially adept. 
Personal Involvement
Personal involvement (or degree of belief, to put it another way) is always an important factor. This is the degree to which the belief is central to peoples self-perceptions, or their view of the world. If your life is organised around the church, around the rituals and traditions of religious life, you're going to be more hostile to disconfirming evidence, than if the issue is how you make the best toast. In this case, it helps that the five people we've noted as supporting the "had to jump out of the way" delusion (I refuse to call it a theory) are all themselves English, and thus presumably include themselves as fitting the "English are more honest" stereotype. 
So...

We are protective of the image in our heads, of our beliefs and dreams, no matter how unequivocal the evidence in front of our eyes. We may even go as far as Roy Hodgson, and interpret the evidence in such a biased way that we actively sit around creating details that were not present (such as two footed tackles which are, no matter how many times you see the footage, a complete fabrication). 

HINDSIGHT BIAS

Question 1 : What Did Happen?

Senor Balotelli deflected an Adam Lallana cross into the net area of the goal, in a move that was counted as legitimate by the match officials. It has entered the official records as the first Premier League goal of Mario Balotelli's Liverpool career. 

Question 2 : How Probable was the Event?

I don't know how to calculate the actual probability, but I can google statistics like a boss (hey Zachariah, shouldn't that be a capital 'G' for 'Google'? No. It's a verb, not a proper noun. for more information, google "verbification"). 13 league appearances, 48 shots. That would seem to indicate the probability as being somewhere below "certain". I think I can get away with asserting that it was not "certain" that Mario Balotelli would wind up scoring the winning goal. Which is interesting, isn't it Michael Owen...

*you're

Question 3 : Okay, What Did He Say?

In (more or less) his own words, Michael said that the event described above was "always going to happen". Two interesting points : one, Mario's impressively unimpressive goal stats. Two, Michael Owen himself did not mark Balotelli's introduction off the bench by saying "he's obviously going to score now!". 

So, 

Welcome to "HINDSIGHT BIAS"

aka - "things you probably genuinely believe that you thought that you probably didn't actually think"

aka - "the tendency to see erronious inevitability in events that have just occurred"

Believe it or not, we're not having a go at Michael Owen. Alright, we're not big fans of his commentary style (which is as convincing as a pig doing an impersonation of an international airline pilot), but Hindsight Bias is a pervasive and robust finding of psychology research that affects even the most wise and experienced commentators. It is simply the tendency after an event has occurred to see it as having been predictable.

 

So...

Hindsight Bias can be so strong that even when presented with objective evidence (the fact Michael Owen didn't bother to mention it) people will still be prone to believing that they believed prior to the event that the event was certain to occur. It is easily confused with the Illusion of Memory. When presented with their own vivid accounts written the day after 9/11, people still believed their newer, distorted memories of the event (even though they had reasonable proof that their present memories were inaccurate). So, first of all, it's understandable that Michael Owen might believe that he believed that Balo's goal was certain to occur. 

So...

Michael can't recreate what went through his head when the sub was made, all he knows is the sensation of now, a world in which Balo has scored. Our minds are consistently conserving resources by creating images of the world which suppress ambiguity, the world inside our heads, our Subjective Social Reality, is a gross simplification which frequently rejects ambiguity, doubt, and ignores complicating and mitigating factors. You see these processes at work when you yourself forge explanations for the behaviours of others, which are frequently consistent with our pre-existing assessments of their personality. We see the behaviour of others as explicable. We think we know why people are doing things, when in fact we're just guessing.

But wait...

Ah, yes, but, to be fair, we do know we're only guessing. It might be something else. He might've genuinely thought it was "probable" that the event would occur, and "probable" in his head might be a near-enough synonym of "definite", and he may have substituted one word for another, in much the same way as when presented with an unfathomably complicated question ("How happy are you these days?") most people will answer a much easier one ("How do I feel right now?"), substituting one answer seamlessly for the other. Why make this substitution? To conserve attentional resources (our brains are almost always working with this goal, unless provoked into working another way). 

So...

We're back on simplification. Balo has just scored. Michael has a sense of familiarity with the concept of a Balotelli goal. We are calling Michael's false remembering as an instance of Post-Event Misinformation. He has adapted the world of his past to fit the world of his present in a consistent and knowable way. After all, wouldn't you say "consistent" and "knowable" are exactly two of the things we'd all much much rather the world was? Take consistency, we regularly see other peoples behaviour as very consistent with our opinion of them, even when it isn't. It's easier than trying to completely suss them out (this task is impossible). Take knowable, the very Illusion of Knowledge is based on our desire to believe that we have made sense of the world, and that that is even possible (it isn't. "making sense of the world" is also impossible, and we mean impossible in the sense of "cannot be done"). 

To Conclude...

Please can we all stop using the phrase "always going to happen" like it applies to anything.

Intuitive Judgements in the Footballing World (an extraordinarily tiny introduction to...)

Hello.

Welcome to "Two Ways That We..."

On today's "Two Ways That We..."

TWO WAYS THAT WE FORM JUDGEMENTS WHEN WATCHING FOOTBALL

1. Availability

Making use of the Availability Heuristic entails forming judgements based on the ease with which instances come to mind. When examples come to mind immediately and fluidly, this induces a pleasant sense of cognitive ease, this sense is often mistaken as a marker of validity. To give a classic example, if you've just seen news of a plane crash on the news, you're temporarily less comfortable with the idea of flying. A major asset of availability is recency (recency functions as a resource of availability because one of the major things that makes instances easier to retrieve is their recent occurrence or activation), so we'll start there...

Recency (in relation to judgements of Quality)

Imagine Robin Van Persie has just scored a belter. You will, for the time being, have an inflated sense of his ability. Commentators will talk about all the great things he's done, it will be easier to remember the good things than the bad. Imagine Yakubu has just missed a sitter. Your opinion of him deflates slightly. If you were ambiguous towards him, you will temporarily lean towards the view that he is possessing of intermediate skill. 

Recency (in relation to judgements of Quantity)

You are asked how often goals are scored from corners minutes after Liverpool, having gone close a couple of times, finally bury one. You will almost certainly overestimate the frequency with which goals arise in such situations (as of Jan 22nd, 2,371 corners had been taken in the Premier League this season, with 63 resulting in goals - in fact, if you take the scenario given above, of Liverpool scoring from a corner, this is remarkably rare, they've managed to convert just 1 out of 117). So, to recall previous work done on this blog, work presently being milked for much more than it's worth, if you'd just seen Chris Eriksen net a stunning direct free-kick, you'd probably overestimate the regularity with which direct free-kicks are stunningly converted in the Premier League (the figure, as we stated before, was 33 out of 577 for the 2013-2014 season). And, if you were Martin Keown, and you'd just seen a wall obscure the goalkeepers view of a goalbound effort, you might question why teams bother erecting them. 

Availability Bias and Judging Defenders
We've said it on here before, but most of the time people pay much less attention to defensive skill compared with attacking talent. You can comfortably ignore Vincent Kompany for fourty-eight minutes, then watch him make a great tackle. Associative memory will fill in any blanks, and all the available evidence that it has dredged up will tell you that Vince is a kick-ass defender (he mostly is, but sometimes he isn't) having a kick-ass game. It is all the information you brain has for you, and you're more than happy to use it to form a judgement (at some later date we shall deal with "Judgements Based on Insufficient Evidence" - it's sure to be a belter). 

2. Expectancy Violation

It won't surprise you to know that you have expectations. You expect certain events to be more likely than others, you expect certain players to do certain things more than you expect other players to do them. You make intuitive predictions all the time without realising it. You don't look for falling pianos, because you don't expect falling pianos. When you see Chelsea vs Bradford on the fixture sheet, your brain pops up with 'Chelsea win' before you've even had a second to think about it. We're dealing with that situation where Bradford wins and there occurs an expectancy violation. 

Matt "Heskey" Mills

If you missed it, Bolton were missing big Emile for their fourth round cup replay against Liverpool. To compensate, they started the game with career-long centre back Matt Mills partnering Eidur Gudjohnsen in attack. Now, granted, Neil Lennon might've considered the big centre half to be a liability in defence, or a potent threat in attack. It's neither here nor there. The commentators said he'd done well. Given that this was a ploy you'd expect to fail, the fact that it hadn't gone down in flames produced a rating which was unjustly positive. Were you judging Mills as a striker, rather than as a defender masquerading as a striker, you'd have said he had a very indifferent game. Judging him as someone who was expected to fail miserably, and didn't, produces an unfairly positive judgement of his display. Likewise, how many teams have been said to be doing well, simply because they were expected to get deplorably battered? As recently as Sunday Cheikou Kouyate, parked out of position at centre-back for West Ham-Man Utd, won the Man of the Match award (don't get me wrong, he did do quite well). 

Young Players, and the Violation of Expectancy
Zach Clough is a player who has caught a lot of attention this week. If you watched the Liverpool game, you'd have heard his name being mentioned approximately once every 3.2 seconds. And it was pretty unanimously positive stuff. Why? Well, he's nineteen. We apparently have low expectations of young players, and therefore immediately overrate them when they perform competently. Take Adnan Januzaj as an example. He played quite well a couple of times last season, and is now being paid SIXTY THOUSAND pounds a week to contribute extraordinarily little. We begin with negative expectations of young players' ability relative to senior players (in reality the difference is much much less than we assume, players develop relatively little once they are full grown adults, simply maturing slightly in their mental attributes : by the time they're old enough to play they're technically, and often mentally, set in their ways) so when the expectation that they will struggle is violated (as it almost always is) the resultant judgement is exaggerated. It's worth looking out for next time Harrison Reed completes a pass or Matthew Targett doesn't fall on his backside (with such an incident Targett, as a defender, arrives at the intersection of expectancy and availability and comes out looking like Jesus Christ, or at the very least Sam Byram). Paddy McNair is a terrific example. Being on the fringes of the reserves at the start of the campaign he was expected to fail miserably in the first team. Having avoided doing that, he's suddenly being talked about as a future Northern Ireland international. 

Robin Van Persie vs Danny Ings

For those who haven't been paying attention, Danny is being touted as a possible target for Liverpool, Tottenham and even Manchester "don't worry about renting a room, we'll just buy the hotel" City. He has played in 107 league games for Burnley, and scored 34 goals. At Premier League level, he has 7 league goals in 20 games. Robin has 9 in 21 this season. When we see Ings' stat we go "yeah, that's alright". But of Robin we are severely disappointed, even though he's doing better.

the Basic Function of Expectancy in Judgements
If you expect sucking, and get a decent performance, you end up with a distorted judgement that favours whoever it was that was expected to suck. If Leo Messi and Jese Rodriguez achieve identical stats, you're disappointed in one player and not in another, one is judged to be doing well, and the other is struggling. It's a question of violation of expectations. If you expect a five year old to read at a five year old level, and he turns out to read at a seven year old level, this becomes a very credible five year old. Whereas a seven year old in the reverse situation is very close to being diagnosed as dyslexic. 

In Summary...
It's worth mulling over the reasons why your brain has arrived at the judgement it seems to have arrived at before you go about expressing it to people. It's also quite fun to see these processes at work in commentators (and Robbie Savage), who are very prone to temporarily believing that some striker they've only seen twelve minutes of is the next big thing, or that Paddy McNair isn't a League One player. 

post #2 (a decorative companion to post #1)

THE "THE KEOWN ARTICLE" DECORATIVE COMPANION PIECE

by Frankjim Sandiballs

"The Keown Article"
In the controversial article in question, the author  seemed to suggest that this Keown chap had created some kind of narrative, using the available resources presented to him by the power of associative memory. The aforementioned narrative questioned the role in football today of walls at free-kicks, this was backed-up by the intuitively-derived master narrative that goes something like "people often repeatedly do stupid things over and over without thinking about them, at least once those things have become commonplace, and it is considered the norm to do those things. And sometimes it is progressive and modern to question why people are still doing these things without thinking about them" (the irony is not lost on me). He now has a seemingly robust mental image, questioning the place of walls at free-kicks in modern football. It's worth remembering that the mind deals poorly with merely statistical facts, and the evidence of our eyes, supplied by our brains, such as it is, is only valid depending upon the way which it is retrieved. A salient event, such as a goalkeeper being unsighted by his wall, will cause other similar events to be dredged up, this is how associative memory works, and it helps to produce a world, inside Martin Keown's head, in which this sort of occurrence is much more common than it actually is. 

The Issue That This Discussion Piece will be Examining
Martin Keown, who has played in many football matches, and has watched many many more, thousands of games in fact, knows, just like I know and you know, that very few goals come from direct free-kicks. If asked independently, on any given Tuesday when he might've been coming out of Tesco or WH Smith, he would've given a reasonably accurate, albeit possibly overambitious estimate. He would not have been far off 5.7% (the percentage of direct free-kicks scored in the EPL last season out of 577 attempts). Yet, to make the suggestion that walls at free-kicks are unnecessary, he must have completely ignored this evidence. 

One Possible Explanation
We often ignore evidence, especially mere statistical evidence, in favour of the sort of routine impressions we form of the world on a daily basis and then passively endorse. We do this in low-involving conditions, when the stakes are exceptionally mundane, because we have a limited store of attentional resources and we are eternally saving them for later, just in case. From an evolutionary perspective this sort of resource allocation makes total sense, because you don't want to wander into a clearing, surrounded by tigers, and have no attentional resources left to tell which way they're coming from. Your mind is continually, unless provoked, abiding by the Law of Least Effort.

Another Possible Explanation
He may have discarded the evidence on account of holding a belief that the evidence was not significant. Rather than ignoring it inadvertently, because it is quite ordinarily human to do so, he may have actually thought it wasn't as significant as it seems. Perhaps he thought that 5.7% was high. Perhaps he sees a way in which we could get it down to 2.8 or 3.7 or 1.9. We can't really endorse this explanation, because he didn't go on to clarify if he had a better alternative in mind. You'd assume he'd have mentioned it. It's reasonable to assume this. But we can't see inside Martin's mind. Neither can you. He might have a lot of knowledge he's not bothering to use. Though, having listened to him, this is another explanation we're really not at all comfortable with endorsing. 
 
Although in Fact
Maybe there is a third explanation. That he said it, not believing it, not even wondering if it was a good idea, not even considering whether he had any relevant evidence to draw upon. Just speaking. Speaking without thinking. Okay, this is impossible. He can't speak and not think at all. But can we assume that he was just raising an issue. He knows it's part of the job description. He sees something that might spark a discussion, he tosses it out there. He's not endorsing the idea, he's just filling discursive space. He has a role, an institutionally modified role in the communicative event, he is there to fill silence, and perhaps, just perhaps, this is absolutely all that he is doing. It would be a perfectly ordinary thing to contemplate. It may have been, to Martin, an invitation for someone to collate the relevant data. He might've simply, in response to being presented with the statistic "33 goals occurred from 577 direct free kick attempts in the 2013-2014 season" merely nodded, shrugged and said "how interesting". 
 
Where Are We Going With This?
Well, we don't know why he said it. We have speculated as to why he chose to ignore the evidence, we have questioned whether he "ignored" it at all, but simply neglected to even and look and see if there was any. What we do know is that Martin Keown is paid to talk, and he did do that. Why he chose this precise phrase is like trying to figure out why your cat is so obsessed with cardboard. It's fair to imagine that Martin Keown isn't entirely sure why he said it, though he may have some impression, in fact, in all probability Martin Keown wouldn't even remember saying it if you went out and reminded him he had.
This whole fiasco really just finally ends up as a reminder that the world is very very very confusing and frequently unknowable. 
There.
Everyone loves a happy ending.

post #1

Today's question of the day comes from Martin, aged 48.

Interesting question.

Do we still need walls in front of free-kicks?
Shouldn't we just let them have a free-shot at goal, you know, more like a long-range penalty?

We set our team of boffins to Googling something that might be the answer...

AND LO AND BEHOLD

Last season 33 goals in the EPL came from direct free-kicks.

That's out of 577 attempts.

Giving an overall conversion rate below 6%. 

Let's not just take that as an answer. 

Let's see how he got there.

He saw Chris Eriksen take a freekick.
Let's call this Event A. 

Then he noticed the goalkeeper didn't save it.

Let's call that Observation A. 

So. 

Event A leads to Observation A. 

Then where does he go?
He has an event, a freekick, and an observation, that it went in. 

He now needs to explain it.

Why didn't the keeper save it.

He needs another observation.

He scans the environment, and comes up with Observation B. 

This is the big one.

Observation B, is that there was a wall, which the ball went over. 

It went over the wall, and in.

Now he delves deep into his memory...

He realises that sometimes people are unsighted by things.

 Goalkeepers, they are unsighted often by WALLS. 

If the goalkeeper is unsighted, maybe he concedes a goal.

Somewhere in the vacant crack den that is his brain, he knows that very few direct free kicks go in, and that having a large obstacle between the forward and the goal makes it tough to direct a sphere of leather into a given space that is guarded by said large obstacle, and a moving unit with permission to use his hands. 

Now, armed with Observation B, he constructs something new - a "Narrative". 

Using the narratives Martin can take his Observations, and transform them into something which allows him to make sense of the Event. 

So. Observation A - the goalkeeper didn't save it, Observation B - the goalkeeper was positioned behind a wall. The jump he's made between the two, is that people are sometimes unsighted by things, he has retrieved this knowledge from the memory that we mentioned earlier. 

He has recognised, from experience presumably, that when people cannot see something that is coming from behind a large obstacle, they are impaired in their ability to react appropriately.

Now he gets round to constructing this narrative. 

It goes something like this.

CHRIS ERIKSEN SCORED A FREEKICK.

THE GOALKEEPER DID NOT SAVE IT.

THE GOALKEEPER WAS BEHIND A LARGE OBSTACLE.

THE LARGE OBSTACLE WAS PLACED THERE DELIBERATELY.

LARGE OBSTACLES OFTEN IMPAIR PEOPLES ABILITY TO SEE THINGS WHICH ARE ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THEM. 

HAVING AN IMPAIRED ABILITY TO SEE PERTINENT OBJECTS IS NOT A POSITIVE THING. 

THEREFORE,

Perhaps we don't need walls at free-kicks anymore.

But oh wait.

Fewer than 6% of direct free-kicks were successfully converted last season.

Oh well.

That doesn't seem important.