"The paranormal history of football"
Are games decided by tactics – or witchdoctors, star signs and premonitions? Exploring areas professionals don’t like to discuss, Martin Rosser encounters Zidane, Rooney and Einstein
“A witchdoctor doesn't have to go to matches to perform his magic," says Mali's top witchdoctor Adama Kone. "He can be 16,000km away." That put France 98 within range of West African juju guru Aguib Sosso -who was allegedly working for les Bleus. According to Kone: "He made wrist bands for the players to ward off the evil spirits," and when Zinedine Zidane asked him for help he "made Zidane a special bath which enhanced his power".
History is clear about who lifted the world's most famous trophy that year - and Zidane's heroic role in the final. Less is known about the wrist bands that can be seen on photos of the French side rejoicing. This could be a case for Mulder and Scully.
Africa isn't the only continent where witchcraft meets pitchcraft. In South America, back in 1967, Independiente fans buried seven dead cats in the ground of their rivals - Racing Club. The cats worked: Racing didn't win the league for 35 years. Club officials hunted furiously for moribund moggies but could find only six. Finally, in 2001, the seventh dead cat was disinterred. Racing won the title that very season by a whisker - one point ahead of River Plate.
The supernatural pervades South American football. In the 1970 World Cup, Brazilian midfield legend Rivelino started a ritual: just before each match he encouraged players to empty their bowels. "Let's throw away our fear," he would say. As with many such rituals, every time it was performed it became a little more obsessive, compulsive. But in France 98, one young star couldn't go through the motions before the opening match with Scotland. "Ronaldo was convinced that affected his form," said Brazilian TV reporter Pedro Bial.
Centre-back Junior Baiano had consulted his aunt - a voodoo priestess - before he left for Paris. She told him: "Things may not go well in the squad." They didn't for Ronaldo - who was sharing a room with Roberto Carlos, a player steeped in the beliefs and practices of macumba, a particularly Brazilian blend of voodoo, religion and ritual.
Any night-time talk of the wrath of voodoo gods would have done little to ease Ronaldo's superstitious mind. By the final, he was a nervous wreck-and then the West African witchdoctor struck, allegedly at the French FA's behest. "Sosso told me he chanted Ronaldo's name over and over again - and the spell was cast," said Kone.
But Europe doesn't suffer from that kind of superstitious nonsense, does it? Hmmm. In 2006, Sunderland blamed a ghost for losing at home to Reading after eight wins in a row. They were happily chasing promotion to the Premiership - until two physios ended up chasing the spectre down shadowy corridors at their training ground, next to a stream called Cut Throat Dene. One player ran off in fright, and striker Marcus Stewart said: "Stephen Elliot is adamant he's seen something."
Some say the spectre is Spottee, a lantern man who lured ships onto the rocks at Whitburn, killed survivors and plundered the wreck. But a cynic on the web demurred, saying it was the ghost of a chance Sunderland had of staying up. Sure enough, the unlucky Black Cats were promoted to the Premiership and promptly relegated.
The rest of the continent isn't much better. French national coach Raymond Domenech firmly believes the motions of the planets across the starry sky should guide his squad selection.
Speculation that he won't play Scorpios started when he blamed his problems with Robert Pires on the midfielder's sun sign. Benoit Pedretti (another Scorpio) also fell out of favour. Then Domenech made the stellar remark that Leos make bad defenders. "When I've got a Leo in defence, I’ve always got my gun ready. I know he's going to want to show off and cost us." William Gallas, Gael Clichy, Julien Escude, Sebastian Squillaci and Mikael Silvestre, you have been warned.
German striker Horst Hrubesch recently told a spooky tale of saints and winners. In Germany's second game of the 1982 World Cup he went to his assigned locker and found a picture of a saint... they beat Chile 4-1. The next game, another saint. Hrubesch nodded home the only goal to beat Austria 1 -0. He didn't find the saints strange, Spain being such a Catholic country, and they kept appearing all the way up to the semi-final. Germany didn't lose a game. On the day of the final, recalls Hrubesch, "I walked into the dressing room, more or less expecting to open my locker and find a holy picture there. But this time, there was none. And we lost to Italy, 3-1"
Italy coach Giovanni Trapattoni kept God on the bench during Japan/Korea 2002. The Azzurri were 1-0 down to Mexico, so he splashed holy water onto the pitch (it's handy having a sister with a habit.) Alessandro Del Piero soon equalised, and Italy sailed into the knockout phase.
Trap explained his approach after a Catholic mass for the Azzurri before their opening group game against Ecuador. He said: "The Lord has many other things to deal with, but I pray he looks after us well." They won 2-0.
Does God support Italy? Not according to a mushonga (witchdoctor) in Limpopo province, South Africa. He told a TV documentary producer: "Mainly footballers come to me for help, because they haven't played well or scored enough goals. Sometimes the whole team comes with managers. They say they need more luck. We mushongas can help.
"Most people are afraid to admit they practise my kind of rituals because they go to church on Sundays. They worship God or pray for good luck, but that doesn't work - because sport is a game and God is not a gambler! God is there for us all. He can't protect one team and leave the others alone! That's why you need a mushonga like me."
Surely the mushonga is right on two very important counts. First, footballers are way more superstitious than your average person. Second, God doesn't play favourites. That's why luck has to be contracted out. But did the contract go to the mushongas or is there an explanation to satisfy the sceptical Scully? In the immortal words of Jennifer Aniston: "Here's the science." Believers look away now.
Footballers are superstitious because they live and breathe a game whose rules increase the role of chance, as John Wesson revealed in New Scientist in 2002. And the emotional and financial stakes can be high enough to make you pin a china elephant to one of your socks and put a coin in one of your boots, stow a tiny horseshoe in your shorts and put heather in each sock. Portsmouth outside-right Freddie Worrall did all that in 1938/39 - but surely that can't be why they won the FA Cup.
Then you have to factor in people's evolved knack for seeing patterns. If you think you see a pair of predatorial eyes looking at you hungrily from the primeval undergrowth, your chances of passing on your genes are increased by erring on the side of caution and legging it.
But this inherent trait does have side effects. When Cardiff City beat Leeds United 2-1 at Elland Road in the 1956 FA Cup third round, there were murmurs of giant killing. When they delivered exactly the same score in 1957, at the same place and in the same round, the coincidence seemed pretty weird. When the same happened for a third year running, we were lucky not to have witch trials.
The plain truth is, we prefer our randomness evenly distributed. Ask someone to put dots on a sheet of paper at random and they'll space them out pretty evenly. But a computer using a random number generator delivers clusters exactly as you get with real randomness.
A few calculations on the back of a small Champions envelope suggests there were four million professional football games played last century- scope for more weird clusters than the Kellog's Crunchy Nut warehouse. And that's ignoring amateur leagues such as the MacWhirter Welsh League Reserve Division (East), in which Andrew Edwards scored three goals direct from the corner spot when Caldicot beat Risca a couple of years ago.
If football had no such weird clusters, it really would be spooky - as if some supernatural agency was smoothing out the randomness.
Then there's luck - subtly different from chance. Psychologist and luck expert Prof Richard Wiseman spent ten years proving that some people really are lucky and others desperately unlucky. When he asked people into his lab ostensibly to count photos in a newspaper, those who claimed to be unlucky sailed past big adverts telling them to stop counting and claim their £150 prize from the experimenter. The people who said they were lucky saw the ad and were rewarded. The professor has worked with companies down on their luck who later reported fantastic strokes of good fortune - but not yet with a football club. He says: "It might well work, and it would be fun trying."
The luck doctor proved that mental attitude affects what happens to you, and this doesn't surprise many in the beautiful game. In their book On Football, Sven-Goran Erikson and his psychologist Willi Railo say: "The psychological difference decides whether you win or lose."
Erikson recalls players who put away 99% of penalties in training-but only 60% in matches: "I have also made an analysis of the shooting of certain players. In ordinary games, 80% went in. In big matches, 80% went wide of the mark."
Sven's stats suggest that 40-60% of football is played in the head. That would certainly help to back up the findings of Dutch psychologist Willem Wagenaar, who analysed World Cup games and found that only 5% of results could be attributed to skill.
Scary stats like that explain why stars resort to superstitious rituals. John Terry, for instance, always sits in the same seat on the bus, ties the tapes around his socks three times, and cuts the tubular grip for his shin-pads the same size every game. Oh, and he listens to the same Usher CD every time he drives to a game with the lucky shin pads he's worn for 10 years.
Sounds barmy, but sports psychologist Andy Barton can see the point: "Routines are very good for centring people, triggering the right frame of mind. Cristiano Ronaldo this season has had a routine for his free kicks, and he's very methodical with it. But superstitions about seeing a magpie - or the colour yellow in the case of Spain coach Luis Aragones - take control away, and I'd certainly work on removing those."
Aragones' view of yellow is so jaundiced that when Spain's all-time top scorer Raul arrived for a training session in a yellow T-shirt, he screamed: "Raul, take it off, take it off!"
To fully understand, says Barton, you need to see the massive similarity between Albert Einstein and... Wayne Rooney: "There's a lot of correlation between a top footballer and a genius. Wayne Rooney has more in common with Einstein than someone with a university degree. It's the power of their imaginations."
Creative players can go beyond mentally seeing the ball fly from penalty spot to net. "It's more than visualisation," says Barton. "It's imagining something as if you are really there. Seeing it, feeling it, hearing it. You can even get smells involved, and taste, it's so complete a recall. The flip side comes if you focus on fears - because they grow even stronger. Imagine you are saying to yourself: 'Don't miss the penalty.' Our nervous systems can't represent a negative, so we get a vivid movie of missing the penalty."
Barton's theory may explain the spooky premonition suffered by the great USSR defender Murtaz Khurtsilava the night before the third-place play-off in the 1966 World Cup.
"I had a bad feeling before that game and couldn't sleep. I told my friend Georgi Sichinava that I was afraid of handling the ball in the area. Sichinava told me just to try and forget it. But it happened exactly like that in the game. I was fighting for the ball against Torres when the referee pointed at the spot. Nobody said anything bad to me [after Eusebio score the penalty]."
Barton uses a technique called NLP, as does mind reader and spooky illusionist Derren Brown. NLP harnesses the power of the mind and delivers results that seem like sorcery to all but those who know the science. Sceptics among you should visit YouTube (Derren Brown NLP Swish Pattern) to see how in seconds Brown convinces a woman that yellow is red - and that someone has painted her red car black. Like her, you won't believe your eyes ever again. Or you might just be prompted to reflect, as the great sci-fi writer Arthur C. Clarke once said: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
Mulder and Scully were both right: football can be spooky and scientific. But the truth isn't out there - it's all in the mind.
Martin Rosser
