You know we belong together...

A couple of weekends ago we went up to Palm Beach, the northernmost of Sydney’s Northern Beaches, which is well known as the real life setting for Aussie soap Home and Away. Never having watched it much – I was more of a Neighbours man myself – I don’t know a great deal about Home and Away other than it gave us Isla Fisher, for which we should be eternally grateful. That and the Alf bloke who must have been made in the same ageless Australian cyborg factory as Lou Carpenter and Harold Bishop, both of whom look identical now to when I watched the show 15 years ago.

The phrase ‘Home and Away’ therefore makes me think football, not soap operas. The classic notion, borne out by almost any professional football club in the land, is that a home game gives you a better chance, is more winnable, should yield more points than an away trip. Look at Question of Sport for example, contestants can go Home or Away and this determines the difficulty of the question (whether it’s their own sport or another). Another example is the Away goals rule, whereby a team can finish 210 minutes of football having scored the same number of goals as their opponent, and go through.

My question is this: why, in the Premier League, do we still regard it in this way?

Years ago, I can fully appreciate that the comfort of a home dressing room and conversely the ruinous facilities that you’d be subjected to as the visitors could of course have a significant effect on your preparation. Teams coming down to The Dell, Southampton’s beloved ramshackle old ground, would often look out of sorts. Having taken the tour I can fully see why, the Away dressing room was smaller than my studio flat here in Sydney (for a sense of scale, look around you. The room you’re in is bigger, I guarantee it). Another unsettling feature which The Dell and other old grounds had in abundance was the atmosphere. Fans were in such close proximity to the pitch that you could be heard by players – indeed in the bad old days this could create a cauldron of hate at certain stadia that understandably got into the minds of the opposition. There was a sense of oppressive claustrophobia, which made the pitch seem smaller, which affected the gameplay, and often unsettled the bigger teams.

Nowadays however, the vast majority of Premier League teams play in modern stadia, with varying degrees of comfort, sure, but by and large all at a pretty high standard. Indeed, with the luxury coaches or planes, iPads, laptops and all the other gadgetry; the journey is hardly arduous any more. You’ll be staying in a top class hotel, training in decent surroundings – there is surely an argument that for the first few months of his Premier League career, an overseas import will not notice the difference between the facilities at the Stadium of Light, the DW or the Liberty for example.

Of course there are exceptions – Chelsea’s recent defeat at QPR, and in particular the ill discipline they showed throughout could easily be attributed to the archaic surroundings and the fiery approach from QPR, added to by the passionate backing of their proximate supporters. If QPR played in a big modern bowl, perhaps Chelsea would have found them easier to subdue and would have been less rattled. The FA Cup shows this year after year, tiny little grounds where tiny little teams pull off minor miracles so frequent as to be almost expected.

Taking these elements aside however, football these days has a huge element of science and tactical input behind it. In any given situation, set play or not, players should know what is expected of them, where they should move, what they should pre-empt. A lot of Barcelona’s genius interplay comes not from 360 vision but from an innate knowledge that if I slot this ball through that gap in defence, someone will be there to run onto it. And then I move into this position to receive the return, by which time I can switch play to the other side as that bloke will have moved on.

Given there is this prescribed element to it, what should change just because the pitch you are doing it on has different colour corner flags? Just because you can hear the nasty men shouting at you, or the bus ride to the stadium was not as fun as driving in your own Ferrari, does that mean you should instantly forget everything you work on every day in training, and go against your entire game plan?

Of course, a team going away to a far superior rival will need to alter their game. Do you park the bus and hope to nick something, or at the very least avoid a gubbing; or do you slug it out and hope to catch a lucky shot onto their diamond studded jaw? This is a different matter though – that is a conscious decision to play in a different way based on the strengths of the opponent. What I don’t understand though is why, say, Aston Villa should play differently against Blackburn whether the Park they’re at is Villa or Ewood. You would see the home game as one to win, so why not the away? Why expect that a point will do if it’s away?

If this is taken to be the accepted way, that game plans need to change based on the venue, then we can’t blame the players, they simply follow instruction. In that case then it becomes a question for the manager to face. Why change things?

Perhaps it is the prevalence of this mentality itself that becomes self justifying. It is such a widely held belief, and so constantly backed up by one quick glance at almost any league table, that we all just now know: home games you win, away you hope for the best. Furthermore a manager is going to come under more scrutiny if his team play poorly at home; both because fewer people witness an away performance, but also because it comes back to this widely held belief that runs throughout every level of football.

For me though there is surely a case for asking the question, and I think that once you start looking into it, it unravels as something of an unfounded myth.

I could be wrong, but if everyone in football started going against the accepted wisdom and suggested that home or away are not the polar opposites, then I’m sure things could easily change. It’s happened before where some teams have had spells, whether at a new stadium or in a poor run, where they prefer playing away and their results reflect this. The pressure of performing at home becomes too great that it is a relief to be in a place where less is expected of you. My argument is that this belief is the key, not the location. If a manager can instil the belief in his players, so that they can go out in every single game and play their own game with confidence; that is the key to success. Set up the ‘fortress’ in the minds of the players, not in the comforts of the home stadium.

Home and Away? Same thing.