Or that it is a six pointer. Or a game they cannot afford to lose. It is time to dispel the myth of the game that a team cannot afford to lose.
The simple principle is this. Team A could be three points behind Team C with two games remaining in the season. Team C draw their penultimate match, meaning Team A will be out of contention for the title if they lose their game. Hence the match will be classed as one they can’t afford to lose.
This quite simply, is nonsense. Team A may well lose the match, 1-0, to an incorrect penalty decision, having had a perfectly good goal disallowed and dominating the match. The point is that a league campaign, is of course, made up of 38 games of equal importance. Team A’s 1-0 defeat in their second last game is no more significant to their overall campaign than any other defeat they may have suffered earlier in the season.
In the current Premier League campaign, Arsenal epitomise this perfectly. They have recently lost games to Fulham and Swansea, matches they couldn’t afford to lose for their title challenge, which is now over. This is true, but only because they had a disastrous first eight games of the campaign. If the season started after Arsenal’s defeat to Tottenham, they would be pretty close to Manchester City and United. Therefore it is nonsensical to start calling recent defeats crucial, when not applying the same logic to those losses at Blackburn, Tottenham and Manchester United earlier in the campaign.
A team can afford to drop a certain number of points, that is true. If a team wins the league with 90 points, that 24 points can be dropped. Which means a team can afford to lose eight games, or lose six and draw three. The idea that any one game is of more value than any other is a nonsense and an insult to the viewer. Teams will also come up against others who ride their luck. That luck is crucial in football and will always arise. You will have games, as Spurs did last weekend, where you draw at home to teams like Wolves.
In simple, there are no must win games in a league. There are simply games. Some will go better than others, some worse, but each match will be worth the same as any other. Pundits and commentators must stop to use these nonsense terms. In a league campaign, single games can’t be viewed in isolation. That is the whole point of a league – it rewards consistency over nine months, not a run of good or bad form.
