No sure things in sport, as Jose Mourinho shows all too well

A late upturn in fortunes saw my tipping results swerve towards a touch of respectability after the weekend fixtures in the Australian Football League.  As an Englishman abroad, I  hardly consider myself an expert on Aussie Rules but I take meticulous care and study before ticking the boxes on my two tipping cards in a couple of Adelaide’s finest watering holes. The pubs in question  are the Alma Tavern on Magill Road in Norwood and the Stag Hotel on the corner of Rundle Street and East Terrace. I saunter into both these welcoming establishments every midweek to place the tips, confident that this time it will be a clean sweep for me of nine out of nine games.  If only it was so easy.  The glorious unpredictability of sport always wins through.  Last weekend I started with a horrendous run of losses before super Sunday saw me finish with a comforting six in the Stag and five in the Alma respectively. It means I am hovering around mid-table mediocrity on the standings in both pubs. I’m not a betting man but I find the Aussie Rules tips gives me an added interest in each game on the schedule.  The Alma has a top-to-bottom table posted each week by the tipping machine, so I can see exactly where myself and my good lady Gabs stand in the grand scheme of things.  So far, it’s only fair to middling. Yet two seasons ago, for one heady week I rated top of the pile. What a buzz. An ignorant Pom leading the way ahead more than 100 other hopefuls – including Adelaide Crows’ legend Mark Ricciuto.  Alas, that’s where my surge towards glory ended.  It was all downhill from there.  The Stag, featuring Kym, Elsie and Sarah among others behind the bar,  goes for the more traditional marker of progress, with cumulative results filled in against your name each week.  It’s hard to gauge exactly where you lie on the overall ladder, but put it this way, I’m not getting excited about muscling in among the leaders.  All these right and wrong results are what make sport so much fun. The AFL seems to be predictably unpredictable. There would be no point watching sport if everything followed the supposed script. In the UK, the “fun’  betting option has always been the football pools.  For those not knowing, this is usually the ability to pick draws. The pools started in 1923 with the firm of Littlewoods.  In 1925 Vernons  came on the scene before 1933 saw Zetters complete the big threesome.  For decades it remained a family dream to “scoop the pools.”  Most households would fill in a pools coupon and dutifully send it off each week. Form went out of the window in most cases, certainly with my dad Tom  – it was just an assortment of “lucky’ numbers based on birthdays, anniversaries and such. The supposed bankers never seemed to come up. It was left for another week to dream about what you were gonna do with your jackpot. The salacious tales of how pools winners spent their winnings were the staple of the Sunday tabloids for years. However, as the social map changed, the pools found themselves usurped in the 1990s by the National Lottery  as the most accessible tool to have a tilt at untold riches.  Suddenly it was Lottery winners who had squandered fortunes who became the fodder of the scandal sheets. But the pools hung in there. In 2007, Vernons,  Zetters and Littlewoods united to form the Football Pools.  The move ensured that footballing forecasting would still pack some clout in Lottery-obsessed Britain. One of my former esteemed colleagues on the Daily Telegraph in London, Vince Wright, has contributed his weekly pools column for many years.  In the UK summer months Vince even switched his expertise to Aussie football clashes in the little-known states leagues. Now that took some doing.   Yet Vince used to reckon that his tips for the fixtures down under came up with a bigger success percentage than his forecasts for the English and Scottish leagues.  Ah, the subtle vagaries of sporting knowledge.  Just look at last weekend… After I had dredged up a late revival on my Aussie Rules fancies, I settled down to watch Liverpool  v Chelsea on the box.  A potential Premier League title decider but in reality already dubbed a nailed-on home win with Chelsea coach Jose Mourinho supposedly fielding a weakened team with one eye on the midweek Champions League semi-final  decider against Atletico Madrid. Yet the Machiavellian Mourinho pulled a masterstroke.  His team adopted a strategy of positive negativism. They defended in mass from the first whistle, pulled every time-wasting trick in the book and gave Liverpool nothing.  The Reds, with the weight of history stretching their nerves, grew more apprehensive as the minutes ticked by. The Merseysiders have not lifted the league title since 1990. So as Mourinho’s  massed ranks adopted some seemingly crowded Subbuteo bedlam where each board game player had forgotten to flick to click, the tension in the Anfield arena was ramped up. At times, as I looked at the screen, Chelsea’s back four became a line of six.  If necessary, it mutated into a crazed, suicidal formation of 7-2-1. It made the Italian defensive concept of catennacio seem vaguely adventurous.  Yet somehow,  Mourinho’s  mischievous plotting carved out a 2-0 “smash and grab’ win for his men that has blown the title race wide open.  Who would have predicted that? Certainly not the baying Liverpool fans before the match. Once again, the unimagined, magical pitfalls of sport had conjured up a seismic upset.  Now if only I could get in touch with Mourinho, maybe he could help me out with my Aussie Rules tips this week…