There was a period when datawallahs insisted confidence didn’t exist – which came as a surprise to almost everybody who has ever played sport at any level. There are days when you feel invincible, when every putt drops, when every ball pitches in the right place, when you claim every cross. And there are days when your club may as well be a Toblerone, when catching the easiest dolly seems an impossible feat of calculation and coordination, when your legs simply will not function. Vast screeds were written dismissing the “hot-hand fallacy”.
Then, in 2020, the journalist Ben Cohen wrote The Hot Hand, which demonstrated a flaw in previous calculations and decided that the hot hand – a term from basketball referring to a player on a scoring streak – does exist. From a layman’s perspective, the tests employed always seemed so artificial to be highly questionable anyway. And it always seemed a little odd that two of the real boom areas of sports science – data analytics and psychology – would take up apparently contradictory positions: one insisting a positive mental outlook meant nothing and the other that it was essential.
