Classic answers to questions about goals and results in the Premier League

Only 12 first-half goals were scored in the 19 Premier League games played after the restart but before last night. Why so few? I imagined a conversation between someone who was sure they knew and someone who was not. I called the knower Noah and the one who was doubting Thomas.

Noah: “Players felt strange in stadiums without fans and they began cautiously.”

Thomas: “In the Championship there were 12 first-half goals in 12 games, which was about par for the course. Why was the Premier League different from the Championship?”

Noah: “Crowds in normal times were smaller in the Championship, so shutting out fans made a bigger difference in the Premier League.”

Thomas: “In the Bundesliga and La Liga straight after the restart first-half goals also averaged about one a game, which was the pre-lockdown norm for many competitions. Why was the Premier League different from the Bundesliga and La Liga?”

Noah: “Premier League fans are unique. They are the most passionate. Everyone says so. Nowhere would empty stands disturb players as much as in the Premier League.”

This could have gone on and on. Once someone gets an idea in their head they will defend it against any attack. And how do they get an idea in their head?

Leo Tolstoy in his epic novel War and Peace wrote: “Man’s mind cannot grasp the causes of events in their completeness. Without considering the multiplicity and complexity of conditions, any one of which taken separately may seem to be the cause, man snatches at the first approximation to a cause that seems to him intelligible and says: This is the cause!”

War and Peace might be the best book ever written about why things happen.

Even media analysis, which should be the product of deep thought, is often a dressed-up version of the first idea that would have come into anyone’s head.

If you answer a question by saying you don’t know, or give more than one response and say any or all of them could be right, you will be mocked mercilessly. But here’s the thing. Nine times out of ten you will have a better understanding of why something happened, and what might happen next, than 99 people out of a hundred.

Did you see this? Enda Stevens cleared air instead of the ball, which rolled on to Allan Saint-Maximin who scored. It was the first goal Sheffield United conceded last Sunday in a 3-0 defeat at Newcastle. Should Stevens be blamed for the defeat? Some blamed him. Although Sheffield United were down to ten players, the score when Stevens kicked air was still 0-0.

Tolstoy, on another of the thousands of pages in War and Peace, wrote: “A good chess-player having lost a game is sincerely convinced this loss resulted from a mistake he made and looks for that mistake in the opening, but forgets that at each stage of the game there were similar moves and that none of his moves was perfect. He only notices the mistake his opponent took advantage of.”

Stevens’ mistake was not Sheffield United’s first. It was the first Newcastle took advantage of. A team could make the same mistakes in two games, be punished for some in the first and others in the second.

Crystal Palace went seven Premier League games without a win between late December and early February then won four in a row and did not lose again until Wednesday at Liverpool. Results get chopped up into good and bad sequences.

Tolstoy wrote: “A large proportion of human error comes from the arbitrary division of continuous motion into discontinuous elements. The first method of history is to take an arbitrarily selected series of continuous events and examine it apart from others, though there is and can be no beginning to any event, for one event always flows uninterruptedly from another.”

Wolves started this season playing six games without a win then played ten without losing. Chelsea at one stage won six in a row then lost four of the next five. Leicester won eight in a row then just three of the next 12. Burnley lost four in a row then went eight without defeat before Monday at Manchester City.

Every sequence starts somewhere. That is to say, things were different before. Then they changed. If they changed once they can change again. And they will. People might be right to say that a team have turned a corner but they would be wrong to say the path ahead is straight.

War and Peace is a story about Russian aristocrats between 1805 and 1820. During those years Russia was at war with France in Austria and Prussia, then an ally of France, then invaded by France.

Why did those wars start and stop? Because that is what Napoleon ordered, according to the historians. Tolstoy disagreed. He knew that Napoleon, the leader of France, had given lots of orders, some of which were implemented and some of which were not. How could you say something happened because Napoleon ordered it when you knew that Napoleon ordering something did not mean it would happen?

Tolstoy concluded that Napoleon’s orders were implemented when they were compatible with the course of events and not implemented when they were incompatible with the course of events.

And what determines the course of events? Tolstoy wrote: “The course of human events depends on the coincidence of the wills of all who take part in the events. A Napoleon’s influence on the course of these events is purely external and fictitious.”

Tolstoy was saying that to write the full history of Russia in the early 19th century you would have to tell the stories of everyone involved – and not only Russian, or French, but also Austrian, Prussian, Polish, Italian, Dutch and others.

A football match involves fewer people, but their interactions are still complex. Which is why it is hard to find the right explanation for the shortage of first-half goals in the Premier League after the restart. Probably circumstances will change soon anyway. And the flow of early goals quicken.

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