Up All Night to Get Lucky

I can get very contradictory about luck. I'm not a spiritual man and I don't believe in any deities. I've little sense that my life is guided by fate, the universe or guardian angels. I'm not terribly superstitious and I'll merrily walk under ladders, cross paths with black cats or spill salt without giving it too much thought.

Yet, I am strangely convinced that I can do entirely tangential things that shape the fortunes of my football team and have an elaborate array of rituals to this end. The main one (and the most absurd one) is "merch rotation”, where I can only wear precisely one bit of Ipswich Town merchandise per game. This item cannot be the same game to game (indeed all items must be used sequentially), must be worn all match day (potentially awkward if I've got to wear it at work) and if we don't win I can't wear it again that season. If I accidentally touch another piece of Ipswich tat, we're cursed. I brushed against my ITFC-branded dressing gown just after waking up the day of the Cardiff game and look what happened. A spreadsheet is required to keep track.

When it comes to football, like most supporters I most definitely believe in luck and believe in it in ways that are wildly irrational and largely self-serving. Ask me if anything my team achieves can be attributed to it and I’ll be the first to turn to the myriad of aphorisms in football that rule out good fortune as an explanation. "The  league table doesn't lie". "It's only the scoreline that really matters" and "it all evens out in the end".

Although every fan base has its contrarians - who read every win as achieved in spite of our flaws and every defeat as just punishment – most of us tend to regard success as deserved and failure as misfortune. Rivals storm through their season scoring own goals, deflections, penalties and undeserved late winners. We win our games in the teeth of dodgy refs, concessions against the run of play and hard-won goals, reflective of our dominance.

Just as we sometimes did last season with Plymouth, many Leeds and Leicester supporters have decided that luck (or other more nefarious things) is our super power. I’d love to think I was above that sort of thing but though I’m not quite as one-eyed as some are being right now (I don’t recall attributing Plymouth’s unlikely form to performance-enhancing drugs or voodoo), we're all on the spectrum.

Ultimately, football is a game where a great deal is beyond the control of your players. As a low-scoring sporting contest, inadvertent ricochets, 50-50 refereeing decisions or pure calamity can change everything in an instant. You can do everything right, defend your lead in the opposition's half for the entire game but still concede from a deflected pot-shot. Then, other days, your goal leads a charmed life.

Good Friday certainly felt like our lucky day. I finished watching the football at 10pm, feeling very satisfied at the hand we’d been dealt. Jamie Vardy missed three very presentable one-on-ones before Anis Mehmeti beat Leicester with a worldie. Middlesbrough were hardly battering the door down, but scored late to inflict two points of damage on Southampton. Leeds, well, frankly Leeds should have been two down by half time and played the entire second half passing between their centre backs, so deserved less than the point they got. They did manage to catch Watford during the best 45 minutes of their entire season though, which is perhaps a tad unfortunate.

Meanwhile, we were cruising for 30 minutes, leading from a very fluent move (not fortunate at all) that ended in an (really quite flukey) goalkeeping error. We then evidently hit a wall. Too many minutes or air miles in some, too much lurg in others. Have we checked our covid/flu protocols lately?

The result was that, barring a good 15-minute spell immediately after half time, perhaps with the benefit of some Lemsip, we had to dig in, defend our box and counter-attack where we could. Between our goal and the end of the game, we created relatively little, no big chances and had the ball enter our net three times without it hurting the scoreline or ultimately robbing us of three points. Lucky, lucky Ipswich.

Well. Sort of. The first one was offside, if a little more marginally than it appeared on first viewing. A Lancastrian "NO!" was audible on the TV, so I'm guessing that George Edmundson was unaware of the raised flag when he booted the ball in his own net. The second one was what the VAR overlords now call a "subjective offside". Of course in the blissfully tech-free EFL they're all subjective, the only difference being that in this case, there are two decisions to be made. The assistant's one was pretty easy (Szmodics was off) the ref's (he was interfering with play) a little murkier, but the decision correct enough (albeit with room for debate). The third one, there's enough force applied to Hladky to get that called as a foul 9 times out of 10. Is it lucky to get three plausibly correct refereeing decisions? There's enough variance in officiating that I suppose it is.

A weekend where a fair few things beyond our control went our way. But then, there will always be weekends like that, everyone has them.1 They do matter though, you do "need a little luck" from time to time to be successful. Things that are essentially arbitrary, unconnected to any conscious decision anyone made, do affect outcomes. If Cameron Burgess connects an inch higher with his clearance against Cardiff a few weeks ago, we probably win that game 1-0.

Fate obviously isn't the only thing at work though and acknowledging it should take no credit off players and manager. Underlying quality puts you in the position where you get ahead in games and then you can win by showing a bit of resilience and getting a bit of luck. Collective ability sets the baseline before the fine margins and bits of fortune kick in. We have won eight games on the road by a single goal, three by a more comfortable margin. Some of these involved moments that could have gone either way - like QPR hitting the inside of the post and Bristol City rolling a shot across our goal line. This is often going to be the case on the road, where you're still a good away team even if you just edge most of your games.

Every narrow win you get away from home will come with a dose of fortune and you're almost certain to come close to conceding at some point. We've gone into injury time with a narrow lead so often because we've been better than the opposition in the bulk of those games and managed the game relatively well when ahead. You can go down the list and in five of the eight we’ve created the better chances (on xG anyway). Lucky to win some individual games? Maybe. Lucky to win quite a lot of them? Not so much.

We might have won more than our fair share. Rather like Plymouth last season, who were a really good team but also had slightly more tight games lean their way than you might expect. The balance of probabilities had them drawing and losing a few more of the narrow ones. The performances put you into a points band rather than on a precise total and they, like us, hit the top of their bracket. There’s no dignity in complaining about that if your team has three times the budget.

For sure, there is straightforward serendipity in this game. No pretending here. We've earned a lot of good fortune, but we've also ridden our luck from time to time. At this point it doesn’t matter, worrying about whether performances merit particular results is a Summer thing, now it’s just a results business. So I'll be sticking with my merchandise spreadsheet. You can thank me when our winner at Carrow Road goes in off a combination of Borja Sainz's face, the post and Angus Gunn's arse.