Those cricketers who have experienced that horrible bloated feeling, bordering on nausea, after the completion of an all you can eat Sunday roast down at your local carvery, will have all been guilty of one thing. Greed and lack of thought! Okay, two things.
Jonny Ertl, the Austrian footballer who rose to fame for 5 minutes the other week when he scored in the televised Palace – Villa FA Cup game, recounts the first time he was introduced to Sunday roasts in this country. First he had roast chicken then beef and lamb and loved it so much that he went back the next day, only to be disappointed by the same waiter who had to tell him that they didn’t do ‘Monday roasts’.
Anybody who says that you can’t have too much of a good thing should read up on early economic theory such as the classic Thomas Malthus’s Law of Diminishing Returns. Put simply, you gain less satisfaction per bag the more Monster Munch consumed in one sitting. The 5th bag isn’t as orgasmic as the 1st. Unless its washed down with a good vintage Dr Pepper.
The law of diminishing returns can be applied also to the selection of cricket teams and the scenarios facing selectors. Selectors would love to send out 11 daddies in white polyester considered to be the most able each week but how would that be of the greater good in the long term? Is this method to be relied upon anyway?
How many times have you looked at a side on paper before a match and think that we have a strong line up today only to then suffer a collective batting collapse, rank bad fielding and bowling resembling of the French street game, Boulle?. It works the other way at the other extreme of the selecting spectrum, with consideration to be given to the need to compete in order to secure future fixtures for the following seasons. As Bono once proclaimed, ‘Everything in moderation’.
A good selector will consider more than just one factor. He will consider many factors without prejudice. A good selector will painstakingly mull over different combinations in order to produce a rounded team suitable to all palates over the long term. For it is a bad and greedy selector who will only obstinately continue to eat his normal fare until he is bloated and wishing he had selected a different dish.
The great Brian Clough realised this with the advent of Sky money and mass coverage coming into football in the early nineties. Fearing for the long term future of the game, he foresaw the current moral and fiscal mess due to the imbalances caused by the concentration of resources by the minority. He proclaimed ‘Why would I want roast every day of the week with two on Sunday?’.
Wise words that I will recount numerous times this season over a civic canteen tea.