Bad Luck for the English Football Team
Just how big a part does luck play in sports matches? The UK national football team seems to be going through a run of bad luck at the moment. First they lost David Beckham who injured his hamstring and found himself out of the Fifa World Cup about to start in South Africa. Just recently they have also lost Rio Ferdinand. It seems the team manager Fabio Capello is a big believer in luck when it comes to football.
Rio Ferdinand being ruled out because of injury doesn’t spell good news for the England camp. Manager Fabio Capello says England have been "cursed" by bad luck after captain Rio Ferdinand's injury-enforced departure from their World Cup squad. The injury will see one of England’s top players out of the tournament. He was replacing Beckham as captain of the side. Capello seems to be a superstitious man because he was quoted as saying that the injury to Ferdinand was a case of, “the curse of the captain”
The ‘curse of the captain’ as Capello puts it seems to be that whoever captains the England side will get injured before the World Cup and it hurts the team’s chances of winning. Ferdinand's injury represents both a huge personal blow and a severe setback to England, however it shouldn’t affect the over all performance of the team. Nevertheless, the team should not use the loss of their captain, or being injury prone excuses to undermine their play. These excuses seem to discount the rest of the very talented team and even though the captain of a team or any leader is very important, it shouldn’t stop the rest of the team performing well.
The odd thing about this is the extent that bad luck becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. If a sports team believes in bad luck and someone gets hit with a completely random injury, then they start to attribute that injury to bad luck. Their performance suffers and every bad thing that happens as a result of that is linked with the bad luck they think they are facing. Injuries are a part of sports; they can happen at any time and to any player. They are unavoidable. To say that a whole team’s performance has been damaged because of an injury received by one player or two players is putting way too much emphasis on those two players and discounting the skill and talent of the other team members.
The biggest problem with this kind of thinking is that it brings the morale of the entire team down because of this type of thinking. By saying that the entire team was resting on the shoulders of two individuals then the manager is basically saying that the other members of the team are not as good as those two players. This will resonate deeply within the rest of the team and lead to worse play from them.
The success or failure of a team rests on the shoulders of the entire team and not on individual performances. So if a team is to perform well, a manager cannot go around talking about foolish things like the ‘curse of the captain’ but should be talking about the entire team’s performance and how they can all overcome adversity and win matches.
Without that type of thinking the bad luck curse inevitably starts to come true and football teams find themselves at the receiving end of some seriously bad luck. It is most often bad luck of their own doing, they let their inadequate motivation get to them and they find that because their morale wasn’t high enough, bad luck follows them like the plague. Sports teams need to rid themselves of this type of thinking and need to bury superstition for good and realise that they can make their own luck and it is just a matter of how hard they try. The harder they try, the quicker they will see luck slowly coming to their side and it won’t be leaving any time soon.
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