The Perfect Punter Week 38: Make your own decisions about the guys you're betting on

The Perfect Punter / Perfect Punter / 28 April 2010 / 1 Comments

A trademark facial expression from The Jester that says a thousand words. Plus, he's mates with Kasabian...

"And we’ll be encouraged to believe these broad brushed conclusions, these national nicknames, but our job, if we’re betting seriously, is the avoid the images, and delve into the reality."

In Week 38 The Perfect Punter warns us against the dangers of believing everything the Media feeds us and encourages punters to decide for ourselves what the key figures are really like and more importantly, who we can trust under pressure.

We all like to think that we know our sportspeople. One of the joys of watching is the fact that we can project characteristics onto people that we barely know, and as a result of that, decide whether or not we'll support them or not. It's sport as pantomime, it's ten seconds of charisma as a passport to fame, and it's what happens when television is the way that 99% of us watch and engage.

To use football managers as a simple example, anyone reading this article will have worked out that Mourinho is insufferably arrogant, Benitez a bit anal, Ferguson constantly angry, Wenger cerebral and strange, O'Neill incapable of sitting still, and Van Gaal a red-faced psychopath. Having been thrown out of the Barcelona training complex many years ago by the Bayern Munich manager, I'm not going to argue with the last assumption, but some of the others, if you scratch even slightly under the surface, are wildly inaccurate. And yet in the character-driven world of professional sport, each must have a moniker: it's Nacho Libre for not-so grown ups.

Nowhere are these images forced onto people more than in the world of professional snooker. Over two weeks at the Crucible Theatre, what we effectively see is 31 relatively dull men, plus Ronnie O'Sullivan, take over a large part of BBC2. And the BBC and Barry Hearn spend those long periods between sessions trying to make those 31 men seem, pardon the reference, interesting.

I watched a Q and A last week with Ali Carter ("the Captain" - crazy nickname, crazy guy) in which he was asked: "In which country apart from England would you most like to live?" He said: "Erm, Dubai". "What would you most like to change about your appearance?" "Nothing." And intriguingly, "if you could take emotion out of your game, would you be a better or worse player?" Now this, I thought, was a really good question, and it made Carter think, before he said: "'bout the same, 'cos everything would sort of balance."

Now, I don't blame the BBC for trying, or Carter for being decent enough to sit down and do the interview, but all we learnt from these three minutes was that Ali Carter thinks that Dubai is a country, and that he could go on Jonathan Ross every week for the rest of the year and still not be a personality. The same goes for Shaun Murphy, "the pride of Irthlingborough" (couldn't they have spread the geographical net a bit wider when they were looking for a nickname?), and of course for Mark Selby, whose birthplace and occasionally wry smile has earned him the nickname: "The Jester from Leicester." To the best of my knowledge the man has never said anything funnier in public than: "I went down the table and got a double kiss if you know what I mean Hazel, huh huh." But he's mates with Kasabian, and the Jester he shall remain.

Anyway, the point is, as the Perfect Punter prepares to go into battle at the World Cup, that we as punters HAVE to deal with reality and not appearance, whether forced or otherwise. There was a good example at the Crucible this week when Murphy beat Ding Junhui, a result that Crucible form suggested was all too likely, and yet many had mistaken Ding's inscrutability for coolness under pressure. Just because Murphy looks like a bumbling fool and Ding like an assassin doesn't mean that the man from China will beat the Pride of Irthlingborough. And Ding flaked when it mattered, and you started to wonder if he'll ever be World Champion.

And in the World Cup there will be hundreds and thousands of cases of appearance dragging people into a bet before reality bites. National characteristics will be associated with that country's football team and we'll paint pictures of organised Germans, flaky fun-loving Dutchmen, untrustworthy Frenchmen, and homicidal Uruguayans.

And we'll be encouraged to believe these broad brushed conclusions, these national nicknames, but our job, if we're betting seriously, is the avoid the images, and delve into the reality. And these are where the best bets will be. The team of psychopaths whose bookings make-ups aren't actually that high, the free scoring funsters whose games never feature over 2.5 goals, and the killers with ice in their veins who lose in a penalty shootout. Trust yourself to judge teams and players, give them your own nicknames if you like, and don't fall for the image, for the hype. That way, we'll give ourselves a chance, and that way, we can all call ourselves Perfect Punters.

The Perfect Punter (no nicknames here, oh no) will be in South Africa for the World Cup and so his twitter feed may start to get more interesting.

Just go to www.twitter.com/perfectpunter and sign up.

Comments (1)

1. Joe | 22 July 2010

   strange that it took until now to figure out the basics of odds