Match Day Thread West Brom vs Southampton K.O 3pm (28/02/2015)

I gave up posting on the Echo partly because their site is too cumbersome for my computer...so slow you go grey waiting. Just tried now and it seemed better so I did add an opinion. The main problem with the site is that every thread starts sensibly, but then descends into in-fighting and in-jokes.

 

It needs more missionary work from the guys on here to sort the idiots out, the real problem is lack of any moderation to weed out the WUMs.

 

http://www.fansnetwork.co.uk/footba...19/?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

 

I detest this type of fan. It is ok to have a debate/discussion suggesting a player hasn't been doing well or could be doing better, but to abuse someone actually wearing the club's shirt (short of them doing something despicable) is simply out of order.

 

Can we assume the the Curse of the "Manager of the Month" award was responsible for our dismal reward for February or is it still superstitious nonsense?

 

See if this one works!
http://metro.co.uk/2015/03/02/arsen...ble-cross-field-pass-for-southampton-5085471/

 

Yes, like when Swansea's first team were decimated before they played us. If only it worked like that!

 

The curse of the "Manager of the Month" award is not imaginary. It's a a real statistical quirk known as "regression to the mean". If you're a golf pervert like me, then you'll understand the following. You have a few poor rounds and you buy a new club to solve the problem. Hey presto, your scores improve. You attribute it to the club and the understairs cupboard fills up just a little bit more with useless golf junk. In fact, if you have a handful of performances worse than usual, your scores were going to go back to average (reverting to the mean) anyway. So, a manager who overperforms for a month is destined to do worse the following month.

It has great football relevance. It's been shown (in a study of the Eredivisie) that teams that have a bad run of results and sack their manager perform exactly as well as teams that don't sack them. It's a temporary blip that sorts itself out.

It's also, IMO. Pelle's problem. He's underperforming at the moment and, without anything changing, he'll go back to normal scoring performance. A more sinister possibility, of course, is that the start of the season was the blip and since then he's reverted to his normal performance level.

Vin