Jonathan Wilson: Who needs perfection? Why flawed City, Arsenal and Liverpool bring the drama

In Chad Harbach’s 2011 novel The Art of Fielding, the shortstop Henry Skrimshander is approaching the US college record for the most consecutive errorless baseball games when a throw inexplicably goes awry and hits a teammate in the dugout. At that, his confidence evaporates to the point that he can no longer execute the most basic skills; he gets the yips. What lingers from the novel, for me, is the crushing sense of pressure of having errors recorded like that, appearing even on the scoreboard, as though the sport had become less about the achievement of glory than about the avoidance of mistakes.

Avoiding mistakes is good. Some people should be judged on the avoidance of mistakes. Postal workers, bus drivers, indexers, especially surgeons and air-traffic controllers, should carry on not getting things wrong. But sport? Shouldn’t sport be about actively creating something?

Even if we would like our goalkeepers and defenders to be blemish-free, it still tends to be the goals that are remembered rather than the gaffes – and if mistakes do live on in the general consciousness, it’s almost invariably because of the goals they led to.

This may be a subjective view (of a nostalgic fortysomething made anxious by change), but sport has a problem with perfection. Once participants start getting too good, something is lost.

It’s probably not coincidence that snooker’s heyday, for instance, came before there was a near-guarantee of players clearing up once given a chance with the reds open; the greatest snooker in history, the last frame of the 1985 world championship final, was the unimprovable climax that it was precisely because Steve Davis and Dennis Taylor, nerves shredded, missed makeable pot after makeable pot.

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