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da bet7： I’ll be honest with you. I do like a flutter. It doesn’t matter if it’s the horses, the dogs, football or two worms crawling up the garden path. I’m happy to place a wager. One thing I won’t do, however, is back my team to win or lay them to lose. The reason? Passion gets in the way. Unless you’re a cold-hearted punter, the chances are that your bias towards one team will cloud your judgment, thus rendering any bet worthless.
Before Chesterfield’s game at Carlisle on Saturday, however, I did something rash. I placed a bet on the game.
Now, just in case my wife is reading this, I can assure you that it was nothing huge. I placed a small amount of money on an away win and then, as a bit of insurance, another couple of quid on a 1-1 draw. I was sure we wouldn’t lose. This prediction was based on a number of factors, not least that we’d brought in some new players and that their introduction had kick started the team’s season (see last week’s blog). Importantly, it also took on board the enthusiasm that I’d seen all over the Internet, particularly Twitter, from both supporters and players alike.
What this prediction did not take into account was two things: the opposition, of which I knew virtually nothing. And lady luck, of which I know plenty. As it turned out, the 2-1 reverse was a kick in the stones on a number of levels. Not only did Chesterfield FC miss out on the chance to scramble their way out of the relegation zone despite playing really quite well but also my bets went up in smoke.
My mistake was to believe that via Twitter I had some magical inside knowledge to add to what I had seen with my own eyes in recent weeks. What I didn’t factor in was that Carlisle are a half decent side and that when Chesterfield needed a bit of luck towards the end of the game, it evaded them.
And here is my point. Twitter is a platform for uncensored, personal opinion and it has brought fans and players closer together. On Saturday it lost me money but much good has also come of it.
In the good old days we used to bump into the players in the pubs and clubs of Chesterfield after the game on a Saturday night. Then, over a pint, you could exchange views on where things went right or wrong.
That’s not so easy these days. What Twitter has done is replicate that to some extent by giving supporters a window back into the players’ lives. And I believe that’s a good thing, even if it helped to cloud my pre-match judgment.
I believe Twitter is a good thing because it gives players a voice that is not controlled by the football club. For supporters the result is genuine answers to the rumours that we hear and honest appraisals for defeats that we see. The latter was certainly the case on Saturday.
Having put the equivalent of the commentator’s curse (the blogger’s kybosh?) on young James Hurst before the game by saying (on this very website no less) how well he’d been doing since arriving from West Brom, with about five minutes of the game remaining his weak back gifted Carlisle’s Francoise Zoko the chance to win the game, which he duly did.
From 1-0 up Chesterfield had lost. And because I’d been given false hope, I was pretty devastated.
My frustration soon abated though. Not long after the end of the game Hurst himself posted a short but telling tweet that read simply: “Made a horrible error.”
It’s hardly a confession that will rock the football world but at least he was big enough to acknowledge the gaffe in public. It made me remember that he’s only human and that humans make mistakes. And that most of the time they make them unintentionally. I liked the kid again. I liked football again. And, to a certain extent, the pain of defeat went away as you could tell it was hurting him as much as it had hurt us.
For all its ills, its squabbles, its silliness, its ignorance and its sub-standard inside information for the betting punter, social media – and Twitter in particular – has managed to undo one of the curses of the modern game: it has helped to make footballers human again.
For that alone it should be bronzed and mounted.
By Will Strauss. As well as writing about his first love, Chesterfield FC, he is currently coming up with articles about cooker spares for the Leeds-based appliances company ASD.
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