da imperador bet： We’ve all had the feeling. You pop online to see if there’s any news on your club, and there it is, and your heart sinks – yep, your manager’s just won the Manager Of The Month award. Yippee.
da luck： Well, that’s that. You can forget the next game, which you were so confident about with your team on such a good run. Now they’re bound to lose. Maybe they’ll get lucky and scrape a draw. Either way, they are now cursed.
Like most conspiracy theories though, the curse is nothing more than a myth. As Kevin Pullein once wrote in The Guardian:
Put away that lucky charm, Steve Coppell. Ditch that rabbit’s foot, Dave Penney. Tear up those books on exorcism, John Ward. The manager of the month award is not a curse.
The coaches of Reading, Doncaster and Cheltenham – unveiled yesterday as managers of the month for the Championship, League One and League Two in November – will probably not achieve such good results in December, but this is not because of any malevolent super-natural force. The explanation is much more prosaic than that.
In the four weeks for which they received the award, managers of the month gained an average of 2.5 points per game. This was exceptional. Any team who sustained that level of performance over a whole 46-game season would accumulate 115 points. No Football League club has ever gained more than 105. Only six have reached triple figures.
Exceptional performances, of course, cannot be maintained for long, unless you’re Barcelona. In the four weeks after they received the award, those particular managers of the month won an average of 1.6 points per game. This was still very good. Over 46 games it is equivalent to 74 points – enough, in most seasons, to qualify for the play-offs.
What is significant is that the average of 1.6 points per game was also what these coaches achieved during the other eight months of the season. In other words, the award tends to be given to the coaches of teams who for a short while have recorded results which are much better than normal. After the award their results simply return to normal.
All good runs must come to an end. I’ll admit I haven’t thoroughly analysed every award ever handed out, but I would suggest middle-ranked teams would get the award more easily than a top of the table club, as it is harder for them to have an excellent run, making the achievement greater – and a middle-ranked team is less likely to continue the run than a top team who will keep on winning.
This season, the manager of the month award in the Premier League has been won the majority of times by managers of teams not competing towards the top of the table – West Brom, Everton and Bolton. All three have had had bad runs of form in the time since winning their awards, Everton’s immediately after, but these runs are nothing out of the ordinary for the clubs – they have happened before, they will happen again. Even Chelsea have had a terrible run of form recently, but they won the award way back in August. Everton and Fulham managers won it twice last season, as did the Aston Villa and Birmingham managers. If it went strictly off form, you’d expect Ancelotti, Wenger and Ferguson to clear up most of the time (with honourable mentions for and Mancini and Redknapp).
Historically, Everton do seem to have such a curse hanging over them with this award, but the law of averages and probability and randomness and all that will always lead to one team by coincidence having bad results after an award, in the same way that no doubt a few teams have an excellent record after winning it.
Quite simply, victories and defeats often come in clusters. An average/good side that have the ability to win about 50 per cent of their games will not ordinarily do so by winning and losing alternate fixtures. They will go on runs much o f the time – win a few, lose a few, perhaps have a draw in the middle somewhere. If a good period happens to coincide with a calendar month, a glittering award may well follow. The problem is that a run of worse form is quite likely to be on the way to even things out.
And what do we mean by the curse – does it refer to just the game after, or a number of games over subesquent weeks? This makes a difference, as an argument for a curse would be stronger if teams were losing the specific game after the award was won – form tailing off over time can be explained more by the arguments previously put forward. Finally, does drawing a game count as meeting the criteria of the curse striking? A draw, afterall, is not necessarily a bad result.
Unless you believe in supernatural forces, the only way the award could affect results is if it changed the mentality of the players – but I doubt they, or the manager, pay much attention to it. In the same way that superstition requires that I put my left shoe on first on a match day, wear my “lucky” Adidas trainers, or always wear my same black raincoat, it makes no difference. I’ve never seen my team win a single thing.
But while all this is well and good, but trying telling it to the manager of Port Talbot Town, winner of a November Manager of the Month award (thanks to theballisround.co.uk for this story). Manager Mark Jones is now all too aware of the supposed curse of the award. Port Talbot Town claimed three wins and a draw in November, and Jones was named as the recipient of the award as his side prepared to take on Bangor City. The result?
Bangor City 8-1 Port Talbot Town.
But to be fair, Bangor were leaders, were looking for a 14th consecutive victory, and are currently 10 points clear at the top, 29 points ahead of Port Talbot, and average almost 3 goals a game. So all in all, not a bad result for Port Talbot.
[divider]
Picklive lets you compete against real people for real money… in real time! Take part in the WBA v Wigan match and play Picklive for FREE Go on, give it a go!