- How West Ham’s stadium is costing all Londoners quite a lot of cash
- Despite yesterday, there are still reasons for this Arsenal supporter to smile.
By Tony Attwood
Undermining confidence is a common psychological trick. It is used in personal relationships, in politics, in business, in the classroom, in politics, in family life – it is everywhere, and it is pretty nasty. And it is used so much because basically, it is very simple: it simply involves telling someone or indeed a group of people, that they are not doing very well. In psychology, it is called “negative reinforcement”.
The point about this approach is that it doesn’t have anything to do with making things better, but it has everything to do with pointing out what is wrong. And most of the time, the result is that it makes the individual or group of people worried – and thus the individual or group does even worse. It is simply “negative reinforcement”.
And this is what we are seeing at the moment vis-à-vis Arsenal. In the last three games, we have one won one, drawn one and suffered one defeat. Such a run of results happens to all clubs. Indeed, there are some clubs for whom such a run of results would be rather welcome.
Indeed, the 2-0 win by Tottenham Hots over Borussia Dortmund, followed by the away draw with Burnley, were seen by some as a case of “turning the corner” after two draws and three defeats in five consecutive matches, which were accompanied in the home games with a lot of negativity from the Tottenham fans.
For Arsenal, the results this season have been a draw, a win and a defeat in the last three games, but that is enough to have the headline in relation to Arsenal “Has the wobble begun?” and “Arsenal’s title tilt stalls“. Yet this is in contrast to the last season results for Tottenham – results which rather neatly run from 1 January to today. In that time, Tottenham have had one win (their victory over Borussia Dortmund), three defeats and two draws. A headline could be “When wobbles turn into outright decline,” but no one wrote that because, well, it’s Tottenham.
Now the reality is that in almost every negative run, there is a ray of hope. For example, in their last six matches, Wolverhampton have had two wins, three draws and one defeat. That doesn’t stop the club from being bottom of the league and certain of relegation, but it is still an improvement.
So what causes the blip of negative results, and what causes the sudden upturn that ends a run of poor matches?
Sometimes it can be pure chance. A ball that would have been slightly diverted, hit the post and gone out on one day, hits the post and goes in on another. But that isn’t the real impact here. For the impact comes when a run of three or four events of that nature come together and either the club is “bounding up the league” on a st of unexpected wins. or a defeat by one goal, which says “the wobble has begun”.
Now, the question that follows is, do such headlines matter? Do they have an effect? And the answer is sadly, yes, they do. They can have an effect on fans who can start writing and posting negative comments, and who become negative at games, they can affect the players who either lose faith in themselves or have that awful experience of trying too hard (in which instead of tucking the ball into the goal naturally they start thinking about everything too much, and the ball goes wide.)
The simple fact is that we all respond to success, and we can all get nervous in relation to failure. That’s always been there, but what is different these days is that the media seeks to amplify the situation positively or negatively, depending on what they feel about the club in question. So Tottenham can be seen to have “turned the corner” with a win against Dortmund and a draw with Burnley. They are “putting those defeats behind them” we are told, without mention of five consecutive games in the first 17 days of this year in which they didn’t win a match.
Arsenal have only won one of the last three matches. Or looked at another way, Arsenal have had one defeat in 13. That headline about the wobble beginning could instead have reflected the fact that Arsenal were defated they responded with seven consecutive wins. The headline could have been “It’s time for Arsenal’s opponents to get worried” reflecting that the last time Arsenal lost a match, they followed that with seven consecutive victories from 10 December (0-3 away to Club Brugge) to 3 January (2-3 away to Bournemouth). Likewise, Wolverhampton are hopelessly marooned at the bottom of the league, or have had just one defeat in the last six games. It all depends on how you want to write it and who you want to put down.
