• Alan Tyers

It's not always black and white - sometimes it's just luck

Students of human idiocy are not quite sure of the exact moment when Apprentice candidates discovered the concept of "margins" - it feels like it was the year the BBC1 series featured Stuart 'The Brand' Baggs or perhaps the year before.

But once the contestants came across it, the concept of income-minus-cost became their favourite new toy, and each cohort since has eagerly and furiously argued about "the margin" in every task, like a bunch of chimps gibbering with glee as they show each other an exciting new poo they've got in their paw.

Sport too has become in thrall to "margins". Sir Dave Brailsford and his marginal gains helped Britain to some of its most memorable sporting triumphs in recent years, those Tour De Frances and gold medals unearthed at least in 1% part by always taking your own pillow everywhere and washing your hands in a precise, germ-busting method.

Billy Beane, compellingly, did something analogous in baseball when he looked for players whose skills were undervalued by a hidebound market that was looking for the wrong things.

Damien Comolli tried it in football and came up with Liverpool's £35 million Andy Carroll. In victory it looks like genius, in defeat it looks Pooterish irrelevance and a focus on nonsense.

But much more than buying footballers because of their performance on beep tests or working out which massage gel goes best on cyclists, sport is about another margin: that between victory and defeat. And we all hugely and continuously underestimate a major factor in that: luck.

This last weekend featured a season-defining match for Manchester United and Arsenal. Manchester United were utterly awful in the first half an hour, their tactics and defensive personnel once again looking nothing less than an insult to the club's history.

Were it not for some heroic goalkeeping and poor Arsenal finishing, that match would have been over by half time. They then fluked an own goal and exploited Arsenal's truly mystifying tactic of throwing everyone forward after they went behind, leaving huge gaps for United's pacy counter-attackers.

Arsenal could have run away with victory in the first half if it wasn't for David De Gea's heroics © Getty Images

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It was effectively a freak result. But there's no way an ego like Louis van Gaal could entertain the possibility that it was sheer dumb luck rather than his own genius that brought it about.

And on the flipside, the reaction to the defeat in the media and from Arsenal fans has been a mixture of bafflement and howling fury at the stupidity of Arsene Wenger's players and/or tactics. Nobody seems really clear whether he is telling them to defend in this crazy way or if they are doing it against his will, but the end result is the same.

Through one crazy game the pressure is now greatly reduced on United, sitting as they do in fourth, and Wenger is under the cosh.

Lewis Hamilton this weekend enjoyed the crowning moment of his sporting life in Abu Dhabi while his rival's car went up in smoke. The luck could have gone the other way and we would need a while different load of features and opinions about Hamilton's abilities.

Is that fair?

The Ashes in 2005, England cricket's finest moment in my lifetime, would probably have been different had Glenn McGrath not stood on a ball while playing rugby in the warm-up for Edgbaston, and almost certainly different had Billy Bowden not wrongly given Michael Kasprowicz out caught behind.

All of us, fans and media alike, want to see sport as a narrative shaped by the actions of great men and women, wonderful skill, fiendish cunning, the culmination of years of hard work. And of course those things play a part, but it takes a special sportsperson to acknowledge, as Richie Benaud did of cricket captaincy, that it is "90% luck and 10% skill. But don't try it without that 10%."

So often, it really does come down to a little bit of luck, of factors that are beyond human control and thus far less exciting to read and write and talk about. Van Gaal and Hamilton got lucky, and Wenger and Nico Rosberg did not, but where's the fun in saying that?

© Getty Images

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