New Year New New Zealand

No sport worth the name on this week so I finally got around to finishing this piece I started about 2 months ago when I actually was in NZ. Hadn't planned on putting much ante-post stuff up on the blog but with the freeze continuing I might put up some thoughts on the WC and Cheltenham over the weekend.

The great thing about travelling is that every so often you come across something that leads you to a great realisation that you really haven’t a clue about something. This happened me recently when I was travelling through New Zealand. I never thought myself an expert on rugby but I didn’t realise just how little I knew about it until I got there. The day after the Bledisloe cup game I did the typical Sunday ritual of getting a chunky Sunday newspaper and a strong coffee and going to sit by the sea. I sat reading my way through the sports section complete with its 8 page coverage of the previous night’s game and got myself thoroughly confused. Usually if I hear the term five eights I start thinking of Nick Leeson, dodgy builders and complete dellboys for various different reasons. I didn’t even realise it was a position in the back line until I got to Auckland. I mean I can watch a game of rugby and give rough assessments of where the various teams are going wrong – that is to say I can either blame the fronts or the backs. Beyond that I’m lost – I might as well use a dice to decide where the fault lies between 1 and 6. Now you would think that this moment of clarity would be enough to make me realise that maybe betting on rugby is a bad idea for me, however it actually is a good chance to show that sometimes less is more. You don’t necessarily have to be an expert on every aspect of something to bet on it. Sometimes you can try and allow for too much information and you end up giving too much weight to something of only minor importance. Sometimes you need to start with the assumption that the markets will more or less be priced correctly and then look for things that might move the market from its correct price. Sometimes it can be a team that’s living on its reputation (e.g. Liverpool in the EPL at the moment) or it can be when the media loses the run of itself and starts to overhype a team or a horse (see England’s World Cup odds 1990-2006). Other times it can just be a xenophobic bias that can be exploited (European horses at the Breeder’s Cup or French newcomers in England). In any of the situations above you don’t really need to know a huge amount about either football or racing to take advantage of the mispricing in the markets and it seems reasonable to assume that if this is happening in some markets it is going to happen in all the rest as well. During the last rugby world cup after several alarmist reports in the papers about the high risk of severe injury by allowing teams from outside the big 10 play in mismatches against the big 10 the handicap markets in the group stages went crazy with the teams who were favourites in the games being set impossible tasks in covering the spread. Apart from the rampant All Blacks I remember very few of the established teams quite managing to annihilate the opposition quite as badly as the bookies expected. Although even the All Blacks couldn’t cover what if I remember correctly was a 106 point spread in the Portugal game!
Now New Zealand have unquestionably been the best rugby team of the last 20 years yet in the 5 World Cups during that period they have never won a World Cup and have only ever reached the final on one occasion. In fairness to the Kiwi’s they haven’t had a chance to win a World Cup in the last 20 years, they have only had the chance to lose them. Every time around in the months coming up to the tournament the general consensus (and nowhere more so than in NZ) is that they have the World Cup in the bag and it is just a matter of showing up to collect the silverware. This puts the All Blacks in the unenviable situation of knowing that nothing less than victory will be regarded as failure with them being cast in the role of pantomime villains on their return home. This is tremendous psychological burden on the team in their attempts to actually win the trophy.
The British Journal of Psychology published a paper a few years back on what determines whether a player will be successful in taking a penalty in a shoot out scenario based on data from all major soccer championships over the past 28 years. This study found that the success rate depends on the order of the shot with on average 87% of all first penalties being converted dropping down to 73% for 4th penalties (nothing massively surprising in that!) However they then went on to look at the success rate when the player taking the kick knows success means victory for his team. The imminent prospect of being propelled to hero status boosts the success rate to 93%. Contrast this with a player who knows a missed kick means elimination from the competition and with the spectre of being the media scapegoat hanging over him his success rate drops to 52%. It is easy to see how the high expectations of the nation back home can have a crippling effect on the All Blacks by making them focus more on the consequences of defeat than on the spoils of victory. All of which in a very roundabout way leads me to my point that although the All Blacks face into the World Cup with their weakest state in my memory with an incredibly high dependency on the fitness of a handful of key players such as Dan Carter and Richie McCaw, psychologically they are probably in a better situation than has even been the case before. According to opinion polls the majority of Kiwi’s don’t think they will win next year’s World Cup. Most of them think the coach should resign. Their low expectations and the opportunity within the camp to create a siege mentality should mean that at least on a mental level they go into the tournament in better condition than ever before. Whether this mentality is matched by their ability and allows them overcome their lack of strength in depth in some key positions remains to be seen. It is however something worth bearing in mind in the run up to the championship before to readily buying into what will surely be the media line that this is a team of chokers who haven’t got the bottle for it on the highest stage.
You would probably think that after all that I would be suggesting a bet on New Zealand for the World Cup but looking at the current prices and without much knowledge of the edge home advantage gives in rugby I would have to hold off on having a bet until closer to the time. Although if anything the temptation of the 6.6 on the Saffers would be what would bring me into the market.