Burley victim of short-term thinking from Scottish FA; Racing Post Monday, November 23, 2009 FOOTBALL Soccer boffin Kevin Pullein with his weekly dose of betting wisdom PULLEIN ON FOOTBALL.

SOME stories just refuse to be ignored. Two months ago I thought of writing about the decision of the Scottish FA not to sack national team manager George Burley for failing to qualify for the World Cup.

I was going to say that the decision was right - none of the plausible alternatives was likely to do much better - but the reason for it was wrong.

The reason given by the Scottish FA was that performances in the last two games had been better than those in the previous two. What made them think that performances in the next two games would be the same as those in the last two? After all, by their own admission, performances in the last two games had borne no relation to those in the previous two.

And what would happen, I was going to ask, if Scotland played badly in their next two games? Well, now we know the answer. Scotland have been beaten by Japan and Wales and Burley has been sacked. And having ignored the story all this time, I can ignore it no longer.

The Scottish FA illustrate the folly of changing your opinion with every passing event. If today's events are different from yesterday's events, you will end up thinking exactly the opposite today of what you thought yesterday.

And very often they will be. We are bombarded with information 24 hours a day, every day. A lot of it must be contradictory, and nearly all of it must be insignificant.

In a book called Fooled By Randomness published in 2004, author Nassim Nicholas Taleb asserted that almost all news is noise - potentially confusing but actually meaningless. In the preface to a just-published book that seeks to apply the theories of economist John Maynard Keynes to the present economic crisis, author Robert Skidelsky says: "Once I started writing this book ... I stopped reading the newspapers on a daily basis to avoid filling up my mind with 'noise'. Any coherence my argument may have stems from this act of self-denial."

As I am paid to write in newspapers, you might think that I am launching a tirade against my own livelihood. Not so, I believe. At the Racing Post we always strive to the best of our ability to explain what has been happening in the past and what might happen in the future. If you observed politely that we do not succeed every single time, I do not think any of us would disagree with you. What we strain to see, however, is the bigger picture. And my criticism of the Scottish FA is that they did not.

Is George Burley responsible for Scotland's failure to qualify for next year's World Cup? Well, it is the sixth major international tournament in a row for which they have failed to qualify, and Burley was not manager during the qualifying programmes for any of the previous five.

THE blunt fact is that Scotland's best players at the moment are not particularly good by international standards. As former Scotland international Graeme Souness candidly observed: "You could have Arsene Wenger or Alex Ferguson managing that group of players, but the outcome wouldn't be much different." Asked whether managing Scotland was a difficult job, he said: "It is in the current climate simply because they don't have the quality."

And that's the truth.

Scotland is a small country with a population of just five million people. The size of a country's population is one of the main influences on its success in international sport.

This does not mean that small countries should resign themselves to perpetual failure. The Netherlands, with a population of less than 17 million, has eclipsed the achievements of much larger nations. They have won a European Championship and reached two World Cup finals in the last 40 years.

Today, Dutch players are in demand at top clubs across Europe. Why? It is because of the way they are taught when they are young. Bert van Marwijk, the current national coach, deserves no praise for the excellence of his Dutch players. And George Burley deserved no blame for the comparative lack of it among his Scottish ones.

How well do football betting markets analyse information? In my opinion, they seem to overreact much less often than they used to - and certainly much less often than the general sports media and ordinary football supporters still do. Many fans genuinely seem to believe that their team were brilliant last week but are awful this week - or were awful then but are brilliant now.

Betting markets, unfortunately, seem to be more sceptical. I say unfortunately because when we are betting we want the people we are betting against to have volatile, constantly changing opinions which betray even less understanding than our own of the events unfolding around us.

Why are betting markets, comparatively speaking, now less excitable? It might be because betting punishes bad thinking unforgivably. If your opinions are wrong, you will eventually pay - and that is not always the case in other financial markets or, for that matter, the corridors of the Scottish FA.

CAPTION(S):

George Burley was probably as good an appointment as any of the plausible alternatives touted to be Scotland manager