John Carver : the Intersection of Ignorance and Incompetence

The John Carver View...

"I still think I'm the best coach in the league..."

For Those Who Aren't Familiar with his Time in Charge...

When JC was given the job, in January - his team was 13 points from the coveted 40 point safety line, and had half a season in which to amass roughly four victories. From his first sixteen league games John "the best coach in the league" Carver has won TWO, drawn THREE, and lost ELEVEN (as well as being knocked out of the FA Cup by Leicester).

So, How Does a Remotely Rational Creature Reconcile THAT?

Obviously, he isn't the best coach in the league - let's clear that right up. The numbers are not very ambiguous in this respect. How then, could JC possibly believe that he is better than, say, Jose Mourinho, or, that he is not, in fact, the worst coach in the Premier League (which his minus 19 goal difference and 2-to-12 ratio of wins to losses proclaim him to be).

Part One - Impressions versus Numbers

Actually, it's quite a simple and common theme. The numbers (which are fairly unequivocal) don't bear as much weight in JC's impression of JC, as his (let's face it) delusional self-impressions. In his head, he is Jose x Pep (with a little dash of the great Sean Dyche, and a smackerel of Louis Van Gaal). You can lose a whole lot before losing ever becomes your fault. I've lost about 100 games with my FIFA Ultimate Team, but I don't think I've ever been to blame for any of them (here's an approximate list of reasons for most of my failures; the game "conned" me, the ref made a bullshit call, my players, I was pretty hungover, miscellaneous environmental factors). I can easily imagine the list of excuses JC has for the results is endless, and, to be fair, the team isn't that great, the fans are pissed off, the weather has been a bit dodgy, one or two of the goals might even have been offside...

Part Two - He's So Stupid, He Thinks He's Good

And, rather than being a daft exaggeration, that's pretty much the argument I'm going with here (and, what is more, I shall be citing EVIDENCE - and I don't just mean assorted quotes from his press conferences). The short title of the article I'm going to cite is "Unskilled and Unaware of It" (it's a quite well-known article by Justin Kruger & David Dunning of Cornell University that was published in the late 90s - in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology volume 77 - and which looked into whether there was a general correlation between incompetence and obliviousness), but the long title reads like this "Unskilled and Unaware of It : How Difficulty in Recognising One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments". Interesting, I wonder if this is remotely applicable...

Part Three - Unskilled and (very very very clearly) Unaware of It

To quote the abstract of the Kruger/Dunning study (and save myself the bother of having to try and put it unnecessarily in my own words) : "People tend to hold overly favorable views of their abilities in many social and intellectual domains. The authors suggest that this overestimation occurs, in part, because people who are unskilled in these domains suffer a dual burden: Not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it." : In other words - you need a certain level of competence to realise that you're incompetent. My contention is that it is only because JC is so incompetent, he mistakenly believes he's much better than it's remotely reasonable for him to say he is.

Part Four - It's a bit like...

You remember when he said he was the "best coach in the league" (actual quote). You never see this sort of quote from decent managers. It's a bit like if you've never played the tuba, you probably imagine you'd pick it up in about eight minutes. Only when you actually play the tuba a bit, do you realise how hard a tuba is to get the hang of.

In Other Words...

My contention is thus...

John Carver is so useless, he doesn't have the capacity to realise his own inadequacy. He's so crap, he's not even smart enough to recognise the very obvious fact.