There’s no such thing as home advantage.
There,
I’ve said it, and now I feel like that kid in the fairy story who
notices that the emperor is parading around in his birthday suit. But
can I really be the only person to have questioned the assumption that
it’s somehow easier for the home team to win a game of football than it
is for the away team?
Let’s run through the
factors generally viewed as contributing to the phenomenon of home
advantage:
The pitch
I’m
sure there are plenty of park pitches where there’s a genuine advantage
to be gained by knowing, say, that there’s a large pothole over by the
corner flag that’s never been properly filled in, or that one side of
the pitch is liable to turn into the Somme after five minutes of light
drizzle.
But
at the professional level, pitches are much of a muchness, generally
well tended and flat. Even where there are local variations, it’s hard
to see how this gives an advantage to the home team. If you have to play on a boggy quagmire once a fortnight during the winter
months, does that really help you?
The facilities
We’ve
all heard about the dastardly ruses teams employ to cause their
visitors maximum discomfort: ‘forgetting’ to turn the hot water on in
the away dressing room, neglecting to mend the wonky leg on the massage
table and so on.
Maybe
this really does have an effect. But you’d have to hope that
professional sportsmen, with all the expensive training and
psychological conditioning they receive, can rise above the trauma of
having to wait a bit longer than usual for their pre-match massage.
The travelling
On
the face of it, this is more plausible. We all know what it’s like
sitting on a coach for three hours, and it’s easy to imagine that by the
time you get off, the last thing you feel like doing is playing a game
of football against a bunch of players who’ve just strolled over to the
ground from their nearby homes.
But
that’s not how it works, is it? For one thing, players don’t live
locally any more. To give just one example, during his playing days,
Alec Chamberlain lived in Northampton – so when we played Luton at
Vicarage Road, he had to travel further to get there than they did. Did
he therefore forfeit home advantage on an individual basis? It’s nonsense.
The
idea that travelling in itself puts you at a disadvantage would be more
acceptable if it wasn’t assumed to apply equally across the board. When
Liverpool play Everton, they can get there by ambling across Stanley
Park if they want. Dundee and Dundee United are famously sited on the
same street, and it’s not that long. So why is the away team at a
disadvantage in that fixture?
The crowd
Ah
yes, the famous ‘12th man’, the passionate home crowd that can spur on a
team to great heights. And I don’t doubt that this is true, sometimes
at least.
But
shouldn’t that logically mean that the clubs with the loudest, most
fanatical supporters ought to win everything? Clubs like Newcastle, Portsmouth, Sunderland, Wolves... By the same token, the grounds where the
singing is occasional and tentative ought to offer easy points to the
visitors – grounds like the Emirates and Old Trafford, for example. You see my point.
Above
all, it’s hard to take the concept of home advantage seriously when
it’s applied so indiscriminately. If someone came up with a formula that
took into account the distance the away team had to travel, the average
decibel level generated by the home crowd and other factors, and then
calculated the home advantage as a percentage, say, then I might be
prepared to accept it.
I know what you’re going to say: if there’s no such thing as home
advantage, why are there more home wins than away wins most weeks? The
answer brings us to the crux of the problem, and the reason that it
matters: tactics.
The
myth of home advantage relieves managers of the stress of having to
think too much. If you’re at home, you know you’re expected to win, so
you line up in an attacking formation and batter the opposition until
they concede. If you’re away, you play defensively, avoid taking risks
and hope you might snatch a goal on the break. The reason there are more
home wins is that most away teams’ defences simply aren’t good enough
to withstand the pressure they’re put under.
In an ideal world, I’d take one of those memory-wiping devices Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith had in Men In Black
and use it on every footballer and every manager to rid them of the
notion that there is any such thing as home advantage. Then they’d be
forced to approach every match on its own merits – work out how to
neutralise the opposition’s best players and devise a system that
allowed their own to shine.
For
proof of how this can work in practice, think back to the 2006
Championship Play-Off Final. On neutral territory in Cardiff, Aidy
Boothroyd went toe-to-toe with Kevin Blackwell, and only one of them got
their tactics right. Imagine how much more fun football would be if you
could turn up every week and have no idea how each team was going to
play.
