Fine margins in sport and making the most of home advantage

Other / Jamie "The Pacman" Pacheco / 22 September 2008 / Leave a Comment

Jamie "The Pacman" Pacheco looks at Boo Weekley's antics, the courts at Wimbledon and "sporting wickets" to explain why British sport doesn't give itself its best chance of being successful.

"It's a game of fine margins" is one of those widely-used sporting clichés that is often wheeled out by seasoned sports commentators alongside other such pearls of wisdom as "the momentum has completely changed" or ""the pressure of the occasion has got to him". You may hear the former used when a match-changing ace is deemed by Hawkeye to have been out by a matter of half an inch, the ball rattles the jaws of the pocket on frame ball in snooker, a crucial attempted run-out misses by a whisker or the ball does indeed just about cross the line in football. Unless that is, the football match in question is Watford v Reading where apparently the ball doesn't need to be anywhere the goal line to be deemed a clean goal.

That's right, a lot of sports are indeed "a game of fine margins" and sometimes these fine margins will go your way and other times they won't and they represent the element of luck in sport that the players in question, to a greater or lesser extent, don't have any control over. That's why chess is a game with an 100% element of skill and why virtually no other sport can stake claim to this because they all have an element of luck to them. Arguably that's what makes them interesting.

Alongside other factors that determine whether as a sportsman you're eager to read the back pages of the morning papers the next day or can't bare to look are practice - best summed up by another sporting cliché that goes "the more I practice, the luckier I get" - and preparation. Well here's another factor that you can use to work in your favour: make the best use of home advantage.

Paul Azinger's victorious Ryder Cup team certainly benefited from that by: using the partisan crowd at Valhalla to gee them up (perhaps Boo Weekley interpreted "geeing up" with "gee-geeing up" if his horseriding antics at the first hole in his singles match against Oliver Wilson, see photo, are anything to go by), changing the tee positions without the Europeans being aware of this and spying on their opponents. Illegal? No. Immoral? No, though I guess it depends on your individual standards when it comes to morality. Gamesmanship? Yes, quite possibly but well within the rules, and who knows how much it all contributed to their Ryder Cup success? Let's say we could put a number on it and let's call that number a 3% edge. Well golf is after all a "game of fine margins" so maybe that was the difference.

This is an area where British sport lags behind the rest of the world. Maybe it was Tim Henman's destiny never to win Wimbledon. Maybe he was unlucky to so often have been drawn against the eventual winner or to have his progress and momentum halted by untimely rain breaks. Maybe he just wasn't good enough. All these reasons may have contributed to him never having won at SW19 but so did the LTA's decision to refuse to prepare the courts in a way that would have best suited his serve-volley game and as the courts steadily became slower and slower over the years, so Henman's chances became longer.

And what of England Test captains' decisions alongside the local groundsman in recent times to prepare a "sporting wicket" rather than one that plays to England' strengths and offers them the best chance of actually winning? I have visions of a three-strong committee out in Sri Lanka made up of the local groundsman, the Sri Lankan captain and Muttiah Muralitharan walking onto the pitch and the groundsman asking the diminutive genius: "Now then Murali, what do I need to do to this pitch for you to take ten-plus wickets and for us to win the match?" Either you want to give yourself the best possible chance of winning or you don't. If Sri Lanka's home record is anything to go by, I suspect the answer is "they do".

And now to a little anecdote from my homeland. Everyone remembers Man Utd going down 2-1 against Benfica in Lisbon and duly crashing out at the group stages of the Champions League a few years back. What not many may remember is the fact that at half-time the groundstaff at the Stadium of Light opted to water the half of the pitch that Benfica aware attacking into to which allowed the ball to roll smoother whilst neglecting to water the other half at all! I'll say it again: "fine margins".

There are fine margins and then there are fine lines. Paul Collingwood crossed that line when he decided to appeal for Grant Elliott's wicket during the recent ODI series against New Zealand As did Fernando Gonzalez in the semis of the tennis at the Olympic Games when he claimed he'd not touched a passing shot that went long by James Blake and which had clearly flicked the frame of his racket. The first example here was poor sportsmanship and a decision that Collingwood will regret forever, the second amounts to cheating. Either way, both were clearly inexcusable.

The point is it is up to individuals to decide for themselves what is acceptable in terms of gaining an advantage and what isn't and at the moment British sport seems to take the "that's just not cricket" attitude in most cases whereas the rest of the sporting world seems to be saying: "Well, there are bats, a ball, a pitch and some stumps involved so yes, it is cricket".

One man I suspect may make the most of home advantage next summer is Kevin Pietersen. I doubt he'll go as far as cloning Gary Pratt and bringing on two Pratts as sub-fielders when Harmison and Panesar fancy a toilet break and a quick back rub but I suspect he'll do what he can to make the most of home advantage to regain The Ashes, (they're [3.25] to do so and that's not a bad price). I wouldn't be surprised if the outcome of the Ashes came down to one little moment similar to Gary Pratt's run-out of Ricky Ponting at Trent Bridge (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dK3BBjfwdM0). After all, cricket is a game of fine margins.