Il faut souffrir. Supporting any football club involves an emotional rollercoaster ride. With some clubs the highs are higher. With others the lows are lower. Sometimes, as in the case of my team tangibly so. Sometimes the lows are just dumb frustrations. Like the fact that, this season, my team is beating all the top clubs and losing to all the bottom ones. To the point where, because we were scheduled to play a relegation-zone team today, I was 100% confident that we would lose.

Part of that confidence, these days comes from running our PanSensic software. Every week, our manager gives a press conference, and I’ve started to put the narrative into the software. This is what it told me this week:

The important thing to look out for is the high ‘Innocence’ score in the Archetypes dial. This score is only high during the press conferences prior to playing opponents at the bottom of the league. When we’re about to play the top clubs ‘Innocence’ is almost zero and the ‘Pilgrim’ and ‘Warrior’ scores go off the end of the scale.

Against the big clubs, the manager seems to know its going to be a tough day. When we’re about to play one of the bottom clubs the message usually involves phrases like ‘no complacency’ and – this week’s humdinger, ‘we are not naïve enough to think it will be that simple’.

I don’t think anyone from the Club is ever likely to read my insignificant nonsense, but I kind of wish they would. Maybe then the manager would realise that the human brain doesn’t process words like ‘no’ and ‘not’. When we tell someone not to think of pink elephants, so says the cliché, its almost impossible to avoid thinking about pink elephants. We’re not wired to process negatives. So, ‘no complacency’ is heard (by the team as well as everyone else) as ‘complacency’. Likewise, ‘not naïve’ is heard as ‘naïve’.

Then there’s the killer word ‘that’. It’s the word that reveals the manager also isn’t processing the negative. He’s trying to tell everyone not to be complacent and to not think the game will be simple, but he’s already convinced himself that its okay to be complacent and that the game will be simple. Put simply, we lost today because of what he said on Thursday.