Football likes to tell us that the best team wins.
Most of the time, that’s probably true. Over a full season, quality tends to find its way towards the top and weaknesses have an annoying habit of catching up with you.
But football isn’t played on a spreadsheet.
Sometimes you need a wee bit of luck.
A shot takes a deflection and sneaks inside the post. The opposition rattles the bar instead of the net. Your best player avoids an injury, a referee keeps his cards in his pocket, or the horizontal Scottish rain decides to work in your favour for once.
Call it luck, fortune or simply getting the rub of the green. Whatever the name, it has always been part of football.
The Fine Margins
The strange thing about luck in football is that you often only notice it when you don’t have any.
A striker can do almost everything right and watch his effort come back off the inside of the post. An inch the other way and he’s the hero.
A defender can make the same tackle he’s made a hundred times before, only for the ball to bounce awkwardly, catch an arm and suddenly there’s a penalty.
Then there are injuries.
Every club gets them, but timing matters. Losing an important player in July is one thing. Losing him before a massive run of fixtures is another entirely.
Bookings and suspensions can work the same way. One mistimed challenge or debatable yellow card might not seem particularly important on a Saturday afternoon, but it can become very important when it rules somebody out of the next big game.
None of this means football is entirely down to chance. Far from it. Good teams put themselves into positions where good things are more likely to happen.
But once they’re there, sometimes they need the footballing gods to give them a nod.
When Arbroath Came So Close
Arbroath supporters don’t need much reminding about fine margins.
The 2021/22 season produced one of the great stories in Scottish football. A part-time Arbroath side went toe-to-toe at the top end of the Championship and came remarkably close to reaching the Premiership.
It wasn’t quite to be.
Kilmarnock eventually secured the title, while Arbroath’s route through the play-offs ended in the semi-final against Inverness Caledonian Thistle after a penalty shootout.
You can analyse a season like that in a hundred different ways, but when the difference between reaching Scottish football’s promised land and staying in the Championship becomes so small, it’s difficult not to wonder about the little moments.
One different bounce. One shot going in rather than wide. One result falling your way.
That’s football.
And while luck wasn’t quite on Arbroath’s side when the Premiership came tantalisingly close, the fact they got themselves into that position in the first place certainly wasn’t luck.
You Have to Give Luck Somewhere to Land
There’s an old idea that teams make their own luck, and there’s probably something in it.
Keep putting balls into dangerous areas and eventually one might break kindly. Keep making runs and a defender will eventually make a mistake. Keep competing and you give yourself the opportunity to benefit when something unexpected happens.
It’s not so different from plenty of things away from football. People talk about luck in business, relationships, careers and everything from job interviews to online casinos, but opportunity tends to matter just as much as fortune.
You can’t control every bounce. You can control whether you’re there when it drops.
Football managers understand that better than most. They spend all week preparing for Saturday, knowing perfectly well that 90 minutes can still be turned upside down by a gust of wind, a dodgy bounce or a referee seeing something differently from everyone else in the ground.
It must drive them daft.
It also happens to be one of the reasons we keep watching.
That’s Why We Love It
If football always followed the script, there wouldn’t be much point turning up.
The favourites would win, the biggest budget would guarantee promotion and nobody would bother hanging around for injury time.
Instead, football gives us ridiculous winners, missed penalties, unexpected heroes and seasons nobody saw coming.
Arbroath’s brush with the Premiership showed exactly what can happen when a team puts itself in the fight and keeps going. They didn’t get the final bit of fortune required to complete the story, but that doesn’t mean the door is locked forever.
The promised land is still there.
And if another opportunity comes around, who knows?
Maybe next time the ball hits the inside of the post and goes in.
