This mentality nonsense

[Bluenose1979]

Spot on OP.

“Bottle” is not a thing in modern football. Even if it appears that a good chunk of our support don’t have it.

File it along with “gets us” and “wanted it more” as narrative driven rubbish for people who don’t try very hard to understand the game.

What does that mean exactly?

Are you saying that psychology, emotion, nerves, pressure, etc cannot have an impact on a player in the "modern" game? And what exactly was the date when basic human responses to situations became obsolete?

PS - this is not me commenting on Rangers performance, simply your assertion in bold above.

 

[Big Buff]

What does that mean exactly?

Are you saying that psychology, emotion, nerves, pressure, etc cannot have an impact on a player in the "modern" game? And what exactly was the date when basic human responses to situations became obsolete?

PS - this is not me commenting on Rangers performance, simply your assertion in bold above.

It plays such a small part that it is almost statistically negligible.

When supporters see a football team on the wrong end of a result in a match that they dominated, it is so often attributed to mentality when in fact, mentality has nothing to do with it.

A team with a poor mentality (or "has no bottle") will inevitably perform so poorly on a regular basis that the manager will be replaced very quickly, the personnel will change and the culture therefore changes too and becomes more positive.

What fans are most often referring to when they discuss "bottle", is actually just statistical variance.

 

[Bluenose1979]

It plays such a small part that it is almost statistically negligible.

When supporters see a football team on the wrong end of a result in a match that they dominated, it is so often attributed to mentality when in fact, mentality has nothing to do with it.

A team with a poor mentality (or "has no bottle") will inevitably perform so poorly on a regular basis that the manager will be replaced very quickly, the personnel will change and the culture therefore changes too and becomes more positive.

What fans are most often referring to when they discuss "bottle", is actually just statistical variance.

How do you know that?

How do you know what caused any statistical variance?

When people talk about "bottle" they may be referring to specific types of occasion (ie big event matches, which do not happen frequently)

EDIT

The more I think of it, the more ridiculous your assertion becomes. Why do managers after defeats talk about having to get the team up for the next game? Why do fans get annoyed at subway loyals or folk getting on the team's back? Why do folk concern themselves with players' temperaments?

If you're writing off the impact of natural emotional responses to the situation as having any notable impact on results or performance, then all of those things have to be an utter irrelevance.

Essentially man management is a red herring as nothing a manager says or does beyond statistical or basic tactical explanation will have any influence on the outcome or how a player or team perform.

Bottling it can be an isolated thing. A team can be on great form, a player on great form, then they can go out on an occasion and bottle it.

Anyone who's ever played any kind of sport at any kind of level, even as a kid knows that you can be great, doing well and sometimes go into an occasion or event and have a poor game where your head isn't right, you feel a pressure that puts you off your game, etc. I'd suggest most folk on here will have experienced it.

 

[Big Buff]

How do you know that?

How do you know what caused any statistical variance?

When people talk about "bottle" they may be referring to specific types of occasion (ie big event matches, which do not happen frequently)

Because we already know what causes most statistical variance - good ol' luck, and positive or negative regression to the mean.

Let's take an example.

Kilmarnock 2-1 Rangers, first league game after the winter break. The narrative was that Rangers bottled it because we couldn't handle the pressure of being top and we didn't have the bottle to play consistently.

This accusation followed Rangers 0-1 Aberdeen last December, when we were also top but then slipped to second following this defeat.

BUT... in actual fact, we played pretty well in both games. It wasn't a mentality issue - we turned up and got to work and did the same things we do in every game. The only difference was the outcome, and that's down to statistical variance.

From ModernFitba:
Rangers - Aberdeen:
Goals:
0 - 1
Shots:
14 - 2
Shots on Target:
5 - 2
Shots inside box:
9 - 1
Possession:
71 - 29

Our xG that day was about 2 - in other words, given the chances we created we could typically expect to score 2 goals in that game. It just so happened that we got unlucky and it never fell right for us. If you replayed that game 1000 times, we would take 2.60 points from it on average.

Killie was even unluckier. Again, from MF:
Kilmarnock - Rangers:
Goals:
2 - 1
Shots:
8 - 19
Shots on Target:
3 - 8
Shots inside box:
4 - 12
Possession:
37 - 63

For this match, we had an xG of 3.91, so we could expect to score four goals in this game on average. Again, replay this game 1000 times, we'd take 2.91 points from it on average, so the fact we got none shows that it was an extreme outlier.

So what's changed this season?

Last year, we underperformed our xG - scored less goals than we would expect to. Therefore, we got some slightly unlucky results.

This year, we're overperforming our xG - so we're scoring more goals than you might expect to given our chances.

Has bottle caused this change? No - our luck has simply evened out, and we're positively regressing towards the mean.

At our level, bottle pretty much isn't a thing.

EDIT: source - https://www.modernfitba.com/blogs/2019/4/14/expected-points

 

[Bluenose1979]

Because we already know what causes most statistical variance - good ol' luck, and positive or negative regression to the mean.

Let's take an example.

Kilmarnock 2-1 Rangers, first league game after the winter break. The narrative was that Rangers bottled it because we couldn't handle the pressure of being top and we didn't have the bottle to play consistently.

This accusation followed Rangers 0-1 Aberdeen last December, when we were also top but then slipped to second following this defeat.

BUT... in actual fact, we played pretty well in both games. It wasn't a mentality issue - we turned up and got to work and did the same things we do in every game. The only difference was the outcome, and that's down to statistical variance.

From ModernFitba:
Rangers - Aberdeen:
Goals:
0 - 1
Shots:
14 - 2
Shots on Target:
5 - 2
Shots inside box:
9 - 1
Possession:
71 - 29

Our xG that day was about 2 - in other words, given the chances we created we could typically expect to score 2 goals in that game. It just so happened that we got unlucky and it never fell right for us. If you replayed that game 1000 times, we would take 2.60 points from it on average.

Killie was even unluckier. Again, from MF:
Kilmarnock - Rangers:
Goals:
2 - 1
Shots:
8 - 19
Shots on Target:
3 - 8
Shots inside box:
4 - 12
Possession:
37 - 63

For this match, we had an xG of 3.91, so we could expect to score four goals in this game on average. Again, replay this game 1000 times, we'd take 2.91 points from it on average, so the fact we got none shows that it was an extreme outlier.

So what's changed this season?

Last year, we underperformed our xG - scored less goals than we would expect to. Therefore, we got some slightly unlucky results.

This year, we're overperforming our xG - so we're scoring more goals than you might expect to given our chances.

Has bottle caused this change? No - our luck has simply evened out, and we're positively regressing towards the mean.

At our level, bottle pretty much isn't a thing.

EDIT: source - https://www.modernfitba.com/blogs/2019/4/14/expected-points

Those are prime examples of stats that only mean what you want them to mean.

You can blame "luck" - which is effectively a meaningless word there's nothing to quantify when a missed chance was because a player was unlucky or because he fcked it up.

But you can't allow for the reason for those statistical variances being caused by the players themselves on those days (perhaps even one or two individuals) simply being off their game mentally at crucial times.

I know you're a bit of a Rain Man about the stuff above, but I also know that there are teams in my work who are paid money to do the above kind of analysis and then mould it to fit whatever suits what the business wants it to mean.

Any suggestion that "bottle" isn't a thing is patent nonsense.

 

[Big Buff]

Those are prime examples of stats that only mean what you want them to mean.

You can blame "luck" - which is effectively a meaningless word there's nothing to quantify when a missed chance was because a player was unlucky or because he fcked it up.

But you can't allow for the reason for those statistical variances being caused by the players themselves on those days (perhaps even one or two individuals) simply being off their game mentally at crucial times.

I know you're a bit of a Rain Man about the stuff above, but I also know that there are teams in my work who are paid money to do the above kind of analysis and then mould it to fit whatever suits what the business wants it to mean.

Any suggestion that "bottle" isn't a thing is patent nonsense.

We're talking about the consensus view in football analytics here, not one guy just making these up for an argument on the Internet.

And you absolutely can quantify whether a player missed a chance because he was unlucky (and therefore is actually good) or because he fucked up (which if he does consistently, is because he is bad) - because unlucky players will positively regress to the mean over time, and will go on goalscoring streaks (see C. Doidge at Hibs this season for an example). Bad players will simply continue to underperform throughout their careers, because they'll keep fucking up chances.

The ultimate proof of this is Lionel Messi, who actually underperformed his xG a few seasons back. Did that make Messi a bad player? No, of course not. The next season, he enjoyed positive regression, scored about a hundred goals and won the Ballon D'or. Messi was simply unlucky that season.

And bottle is so insignificant in top-tier football that it basically isn't a thing. It's a narrative created by the press and used to sell papers, because reading and thinking about people cracking under pressure is a lot more fun and interesting than people simply being unlucky.

It also plays into one of the absolute worst traits of every human being: we consistently underestimate the probability of bad or unpleasant things happening that are outside of our control. We don't want to think that it's possible for someone to go through a dry spell for no reason other than luck, because it's something that cannot be controlled. Bottle though, can be controlled, so it's much easier for us to wrap our heads around it.

Now there's some psychology for you.

 

[Bluenose1979]

We're talking about the consensus view in football analytics here, not one guy just making these up for an argument on the Internet.

And you absolutely can quantify whether a player missed a chance because he was unlucky (and therefore is actually good) or because he fucked up (which if he does consistently, is because he is bad) - because unlucky players will positively regress to the mean over time, and will go on goalscoring streaks (see C. Doidge at Hibs this season for an example). Bad players will simply continue to underperform throughout their careers, because they'll keep fucking up chances.

The ultimate proof of this is Lionel Messi, who actually underperformed his xG a few seasons back. Did that make Messi a bad player? No, of course not. The next season, he enjoyed positive regression, scored about a hundred goals and won the Ballon D'or. Messi was simply unlucky that season.

And bottle is so insignificant in top-tier football that it basically isn't a thing. It's a narrative created by the press and used to sell papers, because reading and thinking about people cracking under pressure is a lot more fun and interesting than people simply being unlucky.

It also plays into one of the absolute worst traits of every human being: we consistently underestimate the probability of bad or unpleasant things happening that are outside of our control. We don't want to think that it's possible for someone to go through a dry spell for no reason other than luck, because it's something that cannot be controlled. Bottle though, can be controlled, so it's much easier for us to wrap our heads around it.

Now there's some psychology for you.

I don't think we're going to agree on this.

Again, you're talking in extremes. A moment can be unlucky and a moment can simply be bad play.

You're applying a widespread generalisation that ignores the basic hard fact that someone can simply make a c#nt of something in a moment through their own fault.

That doesn't make them generally a bad player, but they can also be blamed for fcking it up in that moment.

Bottle can go in a moment at any level. Bottle crashing in an instant for a player who is generally a great player, but who gets caught up in emotion or pressure of a particular situation doesn't negate stats regarding his overall performance over months or years, but those stats don't negate the possibility that his bottle went in that moment either.

It simply becomes about your definition of "luck" versus the player getting it wrong by making a misjudgement or bad decision.

Alex McLeish talked about going into OF matches with butterflies and said there was something wrong with you if you didn't get nerves before those games.

Jock Wallace talked about Battle Fever.

Those things are essentially invalidated by your theory if you suggest emotion and pressure can't have an impact.

 

[Turrabear]

On the match on Sunday we had in my opinion the correct mentality.celtic didn,t have the correct mentality in the game.but they had the ref and the lines man so they didn,t need it.