Momentum, a convenient sporting myth

Suresh Menon in The Hindu

So Australia has the “momentum” going into the final Test match in Dharamsala.

At least, their skipper Steve Smith thinks so. Had Virat Kohli said that India have the momentum, he would have been right too. The reason is quite simple. “Momentum” does not exist, so you can pour into the word any meaning you want. Sportsmen do it all the time. It is as uplifting as the thought: “I am due a big score” or “the rivals are due a defeat”. Sport does not work that way, but there is consolation in thinking that it does.

“Momentum” is one of our most comforting sporting myths, the favourite of television pundits and newspaper columnists as well as team coaches everywhere. It reaffirms what we love to believe about sport: that winning is a habit, set to continue if unchecked; that confidence is everything, and players carry it from one victory to the next; and above all, that randomness, which is a more fundamental explanation, is anathema. It is at once the loser’s solace and the winner’s excuse. Few streaks transcend random processes. Of course streaks occur — that is the nature of sport. But that is no guide to future  performance.

Momentum, momentum, who’s got the momentum? is a popular sport-within-a-sport. It is a concept that borders on the verge of meaning, and sounds better than “I have a feeling about this.”

A study in the 1980s by Thomas Gilovich and Amos Tversky raised the question of “hot hands” or streaks in the NBA. They studied the Philadelphia 76ers and found no evidence of momentum. Immediate past success had no bearing on future attempts, just as a coin might fall heads or tails regardless of what the previous toss might have been.
That and later studies — including the probability of the winner of the fourth set winning the fifth too in tennis — confirmed what a coin-tossing logician might have suspected: that momentum, like the unicorn, does not exist.

Statistics and mythology are strange bedfellows, wrote the late Stephen Jay Gould, evolutionary biologist and baseball fan. One can lead to the other over the course of an entire series or even through a single over in cricket.

Gould has also explained the attraction of patterns, and how we are hard-wired to see patterns in randomness. In many cases, patterns can be discerned in retrospect anyway, but only in retrospect. “Momentum” is usually recognised after the event, and seems to be borne of convenience rather than logic.

The momentum in the current series was with India before the matches began. Then they lost the first Test in Pune, and the momentum swung to Australia for the Bengaluru Test which then India won, grabbing the momentum again.

The third Test was drawn, so the momentum is either with Australia for plucking a draw from the jaws of defeat or with India for pushing Australia to the edge. Such simplistic analyses have kept pundits in business and given “momentum” a respectability and false importance in competitive sport. There is something romantic too in the idea, and many find that irresistible.

Momentum is such a vital component of sport that it has assumed the contours of a tangible object. Fans can reach out and touch it. Teams have it, they carry it, they ride it, they take great comfort from it and work hard to ensure that the opposition does not steal it from them. They carry it from venue to venue like they might their bats and boots and helmets.

To be fair to Steve Smith, what he actually said was “If there’s anything called momentum, it’s with us at the moment,” giving us a glimpse into a measured skepticism. If it exists, then we have it.

Does Peter Handscomb have momentum on his side, after a match-saving half-century in Ranchi? By the same token, does Ravindra Jadeja, after a half-century and nine wickets in the same match? Is team momentum the sum total of all the individual momentums? Will Ravi Ashwin, in that case, begin the final Test with a negative momentum having been less than at his best on the final day in Ranchi? How long before someone decides that momentum is temporary, but skill is permanent?

It is convenient to believe that either one team or the other has the momentum going into the final Test. Yet it is equally possible that those who swing the match with their performance might be players who haven’t been a great success in the series so far.

Someone like fast bowler Pat Cummins, or Virat Kohli himself. A whole grocery list of attributes then becomes more important than momentum: motivation, attitude, desperation, and imponderables that cannot be easily packaged and labeled.

Whichever team wins, momentum will have nothing to do with it. But that will not stop the next captain from telling us that the momentum is with his side. It might seem like blasphemy to disagree with him, so deeply is the concept grouted into our sporting consciousness.

If half of Britain are ‘terrorist sympathisers’ for opposing air strikes, then Isis will win the next election

Mark Steel in The Independent

Everyone agrees the debate on whether to bomb showed our democracy at its finest. To start with, David Cameron called on all his command of history, Etonian diplomacy and wit to call his opponents “terrorist sympathisers”. Then, if anyone objected, he replied: “Look, we must move on.” This is debating at the highest level, and it would be marvellous to see Cameron try this method in pubs on the council estates of Peckham.

Opinion polls suggest that half of the population opposes the bombing, so the situation is worse than we thought, with around 30 million terrorist sympathisers – which is quite a worry as it means that Isis could win a general election, as long as its leader didn’t spoil his chances by saying something daft in the TV debates.

Then there were the Labour MPs supporting the bombing, who all assured us: “I have given this matter a great deal of thought and not taken this decision lightly.” This was highly considerate of them. Not one of them said: “I’ve given this no thought as I couldn’t give a monkey’s wank. So I made my decision by putting two slugs on a beermat and the one on the left reached the end first, so I’m with Corbyn.”

Then came the speech by Hilary Benn, which was so powerful that it persuaded MPs such as Stella Creasy to vote with Cameron. She said afterwards: “Benn persuaded me fascism should be defeated.”
Presumably then, until his speech, she thought fascism was worth a try. When she makes a full statement, it will say: “I always thought I might try fascism as a hobby when I retire, but Hilary explained the negative aspects very well so, on balance, I decided it’s best to defeat it.”

Benn has been praised for being “impassioned”. That was certainly true of the longest part of his speech, which went something like: “These people hate us. They hate our values, they hate our democracy, they hate our way of life. They hate our food, they hate our pets, they hate our weather, they have utter contempt for our garden centres, they despise Adele’s new album, they hate Cornwall, they hate Football Focus – and hated it even when it was presented by Des Lynam – and they can’t stand our flora and fauna, including our bluebells.”

Dozens of MPs were keen to remind us how much Isis hates us, which would be a reasonable point, if people opposed to bombing were saying: “Oh, I don’t think they mind us all that much. We’ve just got off on the wrong foot. Maybe if we invite them to a barbecue we’ll find out we’ve got more in common that we realise.”

It’s a shame that Benn didn’t have longer to speak, as he could have been impassioned about one more aspect of the rise of Isis, which is that most people agree this was caused – at least in part – by the disastrous invasion of Iraq, which Hilary Benn also voted for. You would think that might crop up, but instead we should just accept that the obvious solution to any disaster is to get the people who caused it to put it right by doing exactly what caused it in the first place. That’s why, if an electrician sets your house on fire, you insist on getting the same one to repair it, and on no account take any notice of the idiot who kept shouting: “Don’t do that, you’ll set the house on fire.” 

Some Labour MPs have assured us that the debate was different from the one before the invasion of Iraq because this time Cameron’s assessment and intelligence was “convincing”. But at the time Tony Blair was trying to convince people, and he sounded convincing as well. He didn’t turn up to the Iraq debate wearing a chicken costume, then swallow a balloon full of helium before screaming “Saddam can attack us in 45 minutes” in a squeaky voice and blowing bubbles at John Prescott.

Blair told us, with a solemn gaze, that to take no action in Iraq would be lethal, that we couldn’t stand aside, that there was a plan for what to do after the invasion, and he knew for a fact there were weapons of mass destruction. Now we are told that to take no action in Syria would be lethal, there is a plan for what to do after air strikes, we can’t stand aside and Cameron knows for a fact there are 70,000 moderates waiting for us to help out.

Few military experts believe this; Max Hastings says it is “bonkers”. But most MPs would believe Cameron if he said: “I have also been informed that there is a moderate, giant, two-headed bulldog, allied neither to Daesh nor to Assad, who will chew Isis to death once our brave pilots have bombed the region.”

Similarly, they believe the Defence Secretary Philip Hammond’s claim that there is a plan to introduce “free and fair elections” in Syria within 18 months, and this plan is “backed by Saudi Arabia”. That makes sense: if Saudi Arabia is known for one thing, it’s putting on elections. It’s just elections, elections, elections in Saudi. It’s a wonder they get anything else done.

We will all get excited over the next few days, when we see blurred film of something going up in smoke in a desert, and we are told this is a precision bomb blowing up an Isis factory where they manufacture evil.

The only other development we can so easily predict is that, in 10 years’ time, lots of politicians will say: “Of course, in retrospect, it’s easy to see that the bombing of Syria was a catastrophe. But this is different, so it’s essential we bomb Finland. They hate us.”