In his new book “The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable” Nassim Nicholas Taleb discusses a phenomenon of the way we deal with our increasingly complex world. We’re hopeless at predicting major events, but we still analyse those events in the belief that we’ll be ready next time. Of course, there will never be an identical “next time”, because there’s so much randomness in these events. The lessons of 9/11 didn’t prevent Bali or 7/7, and the proven success of Google didn’t inspire us all to bet on the success of Myspace.
On a (slightly) more banal level, football is full of Black Swans. At the start of 2007, when Lincoln City were sitting comfortably in the automatic promotion positions, I was confident. After four unsuccessful attempts in the play-offs, this time they’d do it the easy way. Their scoring rate and away form were unmatched in the division (and possibly the whole Nationwide League)… why would that change?
Well, it changed. A dismal January-March run saw them slip out of the automatic promotion places and into the play-off places, remaining in the top five only by dint of their stunning autumn strike rate. Like all armchair punters, I analysed and compared, trying to spot the pattern which would explain this dip in form and produce the magic formula to turn things around. And of course there was no magic formula… despite all the tweaks to both attack and defence, the players who had performed so well in late 2006 dug in once again and won the necessary points during the last three matches. The Black Swan of the dip in form was followed by the Black Swan of the rediscovery of form.
So, to summarise, it’s play-off time again, and while Bristol Rovers (powering into the play-offs at the last gasp) aren’t the team I wanted to face at the semi-final stage, there’s no point reading too much into the fixtures. With two games to play before the Wembley final, there’s plenty of time for another Black Swan or two.