- Arsenal v Lyon: being gruntled rather than disgruntled, and Lyon
- A disappointment, but there could be good news to come.
Not knowing and not having the data that can help us know, is no deterrent when it comes to telling other people what to do and how to do it.
That would be my view in terms of football journalism and blogging. And it is interesting that this is pretty much the conclusion of a report from the British Psychological Society, although they put it slightly differently saying “information inadequacy is no barrier to arriving at a decision, and that initial decisions heavily influence ideas when new information arrives.”
For this is something we see all the time, as it is rare indeed for football reporting to be much more than the opinions of bystanders, unhampered by the facts.
And yet facts can be helpful. For example, the fact that of the ten games Arsenal have played at home this season across all competitions, they have not lost a single one. In fact eight have been won and two (the matches against Liverpool and Brighton) have been drawn.
The goal tally is 25 goals for Arsenal and six for the opposition. Now I have to point out that this includes a League Cup match, but then it also includes two Champions League games one of which was against France’s fly-away league leaders.
In fact only one other club in the league is unbeaten at home this season across all matches and that is Brentford (although only just as the got through their home League Cup game against Championship team Sheffield Wednesday by winning on penalties.)
It is a record that brings with it a psychological home advantage for Arsenal – just as a series of defeats brings a huge psychological disadvantage, a view that one mustn’t make a single mistake, and if an opposition goal goes in, an attitude of “here we go again”.
Of course, taking into account psychological factors has never been very popular in England, with the viewpoint among many that tends to confuse psychological factors with psychiatry and psychiatrists.
As a result, the mental preparations for football matches tend to be ignored by most of the media: another example of information inadequacy.
But then being unbeaten in ten home games this season doesn’t guarantee that Arsenal will win tomorrow night in the Champions League, although it puts the team in a much better frame of mind than a lesser set of results would have done, even if the goal scoring has not been enormously high with the majority of games having involved Arsenal just scoring one or two. But even so the result is still eight wins and two draws.
We might also add into this the observation that in the last six home games, four have involved the opposition not scoring a single goal.
In comparison however, in 14 games Monaco have scored 24 goals to Arsenal’s 29 goals in 15 games. But away from home they are not quite as steady as we might imagine, having played six, won four and lost two. And with this data we can compare Arsenal at home with Monaco away.
| Pos | Club | P | W | D | L | F | A | GD | Pts |
| 3 | Arsenal home | 7 | 5 | 2 | 0 | 17 | 6 | +11 | 17 |
| 3 | Monaco away | 6 | 4 | 0 | 2 | 12 | 6 | +6 | 12 |
But of course, even with all this data,a there’s still a lot that we don’t know – which is why predicting results is never perfect. It’s the effect of “not knowing what we don’t know” as Socrates once said (according to Plato).
Which does raise one other point, since we are in the area of knowledge. It’s a thing called the Dunning-Kruger Effect, which shows that people with particularly limited knowledge of a subject (and here I find my thoughts drawn once again to the majority of football journalists and bloggers) “are likely to vastly overestimate their abilities.”
As a result they go on pontificating, and ignore the fact that most of the time they get it all wrong, relying on the fact that their readers have probably forgotten anyway.
But the main point is that what most people do is assume “they have the same amount of information as everyone else — making them feel they’re just as competent as anyone to make thoughtful, sensible decisions that everyone will agree with.” (More on this here, if you are interested).
So a certain amount of care is needed when evaluating journalistic predictions and prognostications – including mine of course. But I still think Arsenal will win.
