Northern Ireland v Austria

SERENDIPITY CANWORK FOR OR AGAINST YOU I like words. I like to try to find the right ones to use. I like the challenge of language.

Who am I to row against the flow? But what is the word to use when serendipity works against you? How do we describe it when the ball hits the post and comes back into the goalkeeper’s hands rather than deflecting into the net? I wonder what is the correct word for this happening on a number of occasions in successive matches? Is it inauspicious, luckless, ill-starred, unfortunate or ill-fated. Or how can we rationalise and describe just good old fashioned bad luck? Luck is certainly difficult to fathom and define. One man’s luck is, probably by definition, someone else’s bad luck. Footballers don’t deliberately shoot wide, they don’t, in that split second they have between spotting the opportunity and the exercise of the action, decide to slam the ball against the base of the post rather than stick the ball in the back of the net. The Nations League campaign has not seen us having the best of luck. Matches have been lost by the odd goal, the special piece of skill. We have been severely punished for our mistakes. It would appear we have decided it seems to be more fun to hit the post than hit the back of the net. Let’s hope the tide is turning and that lady luck (if she exists) is smiling on us this evening. Let us hope for some serendipity. I could do with finding a tenner and a little win would send us all into Christmas happy! Words William Campbell

And as Lewis Carroll wrote in Through The Looking- Glass, ‘“When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less”.’ One of my favourite words is serendipity. This is defined as ‘the occurence and development of events by chance in a happy or beneficial way’. It’s the finding of the £10 note in the pocket of your trousers that you haven’t worn for a while, the bumping into an old and long lost friend in an unexpected place or at an unexpected time. In footballing terms serendipity is the ridiculous own goal or the goalkeeper’s howler that lets your team back into a game which was running away from them, or the unexpected (and perhaps unwarranted) penalty decision for your team. Of course the game is about far more than luck. Talent and ability and drive and commitment count, too. But as Gary Player, the South African golfing superstar of the 1960s and 1970s, famously said, ‘the harder I practice the luckier I get’. It’s the old maxim about 10,000 hours of practice to get to be world class in any discipline (although this has largely been dismissed). It’s David Beckham or Cristiano Ronaldo spending hours after training honing their free-kick skills, and yet not every free-kick sails majestically into the roof of the net, not every corner meets the head at which it is aimed. Napoleon Bonaparte is reputed to have said ‘I would rather have a lucky general than one who is good’ (albeit it was probably said in French with a Corsican accent!).

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