Hand of God

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Never mind the Special One; according to the sports press I’m the Lucky One.

After the death of João Zarco (unlucky) I was lucky to land the job as the caretaker manager of London City, and even luckier to keep it at the end of the 2013–14 season. City were judged lucky to finish fourth in the BPL; we were also judged to have been lucky to reach the Capital One Cup Final and the FA Cup Semi-final, both of which we lost.

Personally, I thought we were unlucky not to win something, but The Times thought different:

I’ve never thought of myself as being lucky, least of all when I was doing eighteen months in Wandsworth nick for a crime I didn’t commit.

And I had only one superstition when I was a professional footballer: I used to kick the ball as hard as I could whenever I took a penalty.

As a general rule I don’t know if today’s generation of players are any more credulous than my lot were, but if their tweets and Facebook posts from the World Cup in Brazil are anything to go by, the lads who are playing the game today are as devoted to the idea of luck as a witch-doctors’ convention in Las Vegas. Since few of them ever go to church, mosque or shul, perhaps it’s not that surprising that they should have so many superstitions; indeed, superstition may be the only religion that these often ignorant souls can cope with. As a manager I’ve done my best to gently discourage superstitions in my players, but it’s a battle you can’t ever hope to win. Whether it’s a meticulous and always inconvenient pre-match ritual, a propitious shirt number, a lucky beard, or a providential T-shirt with an image of the Duke of Edinburgh — I kid you not — superstitions in football are still as much a part of the modern game as in-betting, compression shirts and Kinesio tape.

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