This weekend, Roy Hodgson did something that looked, on the face of it, very peculiar.
Argentina and England illustrate why football management is a guessing game
Roy Hodgson got lucky this weekend. Gerardo Martino didn’t. One isn’t smarter than the other.
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At halftime in Ljubljana, on Saturday afternoon, England, who had been playing quite well, were losing 1-0 to Slovenia. Hodgson looked at Phil Jones, his fill-in right back, who had somehow contrived to injure himself by landing on top of Jack Wilshere. And he looked at his bench, which contained -- among other players -- Nathaniel Clyne, a right back by trade and inclination, who arguably should have started, and who is better in both attack and defense than Jones with two working feet.
And then he brought on Adam Lallana and moved Jordan Henderson into defense.
At least one prominent football journalist pronounced this change to be “mind boggling,” and he wasn’t alone. And while plenty of other people could see the wisdom in keeping two substitutes in hand and getting Lallana into the middle, even the most ardent of the Hodge loyalists must have had a moment’s pause. Phil Jones, after all, isn’t a particularly good right back. But neither is Jordan Henderson. And deliberately playing not particularly good right backs when you have a great one on your bench is ... well, let’s call it innovative.
In the event, of course, it all worked out: Wilshere smacked in two from distance, then Henderson and Lallana combined nicely to set up Wayne Rooney to score the winner. Hodgson, however, resisted the urge to luxuriate in his own retrospective genius/apologize for his deeply peculiar initial decision, and instead ’fessed up to a bit of good fortune:
Jordan Henderson did very well at right back. We were thinking that we would be limiting our options if we replaced Phil Jones with another defender. It was harsh on Nathaniel Clyne, he doesn’t deserve that, but it was the best way to get Adam Lallana on. Luckily both moves worked out well, we dominated the game totally for long periods.
Less lucky this weekend was Gerardo Martino, manager of Argentina, who also found himself needing to make some in-game changes. Up 2-1 against Paraguay, he convinced himself that the best way for his side to hang onto his lead would be to refresh the attack and, in theory, force the opposition back into their shell. But it didn't work: Tevez and Higuain came on, Argentina's attack decoupled from the defense, and Paraguay nicked the equalizer.
Two experienced football managers looked at two finely balanced games, looked at the options available, and came up with a plan. One got a good result and looks extremely clever as a result; the other didn’t, and looks like a buffoon. But take them as a pair and we can perhaps uncover a secret and universal truth about football management: Everybody is guessing. All the time.
Not guessing like some random civilian would be guessing, of course. These are two men more-or-less at the peak of their profession, with years and years of footballing knowledge and experience behind them. But still: Martino’s plan was a perfectly reasonable one -- it’s not as though he put Higuain in goal -- and there’s absolutely no reason that it shouldn’t have worked. Tevez is pretty scary. Higuain isn’t completely dreadful. Leo Messi was still on the pitch. And then it didn’t.
Rafa Benitez, talking to the Anfield Wrap’s Neil Atkinson, once explained the thought processes behind his decision not to start Peter Crouch in the 2007 Champions League final. For him, football management wasn’t about right decisions versus wrong decisions. It was about looking at all the options, all the possibilities and deciding which is the most likely to be the most right. This is a good idea. So is this. And this. Which is the best? Which is going to work? Which, given everything else, is the rightest?
Other managers are, you suspect, more impulsive in their decisions. And of course, football managers aren’t alone in this: everybody that you meet, even exceptionally handsome football writers, is guessing their way through life. The sentence before this one is a guess. But football managers have their guesses tested in a much more direct way than most of us, and the really good ones get to have their guesses tested in front of a live audience of tens of thousands, with millions more watching on television.
Football is chaos. Well, not quite. Football is profoundly chaotic. In The Numbers Game, Chris Anderson and David Sally crunched some numbers and decided that when it comes to a game of football, skill and luck split responsibility 50/50. And while you might decide to ignore their precise conclusions, nobody’s pretending that everything that happens on a football pitch comes about as a result of carefully laid and consequently enacted planning. For a start, half of those involved are directly fighting the other half. For a middle, all those involved are quivering at emotional and physical extremes. And for an end, the actual business of kicking a ball precisely is really difficult, even for the extremely skilled.
A lot of the time, things go as expected. But a lot of the time, they don’t. Good substitutions can be strokes of genius, can be flashes of inspiration, can be the result of long and careful planning. Bad substitution can be exactly the same things: the only difference is, they don’t work. The difference between Roy Hodgson and Tata Martino, this weekend? One guessed right.
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