booster cogburn wrote:Playing devil's advocate for a minute, how do you determine that Fleetwood (playing as attractively as they did) deserved an equaliser? If you don't shoot accurately enough to beat the goalkeeper, you don't deserve to score surely? And by the same token did Etheridge deserve to concede?
Because football is a low scoring sport, with matches decided by one or a few decisive moments, it is often the case that team that objectively plays the best does not win.
This is less true of high scoring sports such as basketball, table tennis, squash etc. Generally speaking the best player or team on the day always wins in those sports.
The many random elements in a game of football means that goals are sometimes scored by the team that is not the better team on the day, and also that a team that is generally playing very well does not manage to score any goals.
I have seen people make the argument "The aim of football is scoring goals, so the team that scores the most goals must be the best team on the day." That is a false argument, because it is circular reasoning. It answers the proposition that sometimes the best team does not win by defining the "best team" as the team that scores the most goals. This is obviously a silly argument, since it does not address the issue as to whether a team can play better on the day, but still lose.