Because there isn't one to mention!
Chris Powell has had a few nominations for Manager of the Month (MoM) this season. Every time this has been accompanied by people, supposedly rational Charlton fans, saying that they hope he doesn't win it because "it's cursed". Well this time he has won it and all credit to him. Thankfully the number of curse mentions is lower than we've had previously, perhaps because if you believe in that sort of thing it's too late to worry as you'll now believe that the curse is invoked anyway. Perhaps, because people have realised it's a load of old nonsense. If you haven't realised this already, below is the proof. The table here lists all of the MoMs for all four divisions so far this season. It shows how well their teams did in the month that they won it and in the months immediately before and after. If you don't want to wade through the lot, just have a look at the average stats on the bottom row.
What it tells us is that a team whose manager wins the MoM accolade earns on average 2.7 points per match. It's easy to see why, when people pay attention to that managers' team they see a dip in form, because on average the points return for the following month is just 1.7. Cursed? Not a bit of it. What is far more instructive is to compare the following month with the month previous to the win, in other words, what is happening either side of the special month. What we find is that the average points return for that month is exactly the same, 1.7. So no curse at all, it's just that the month of the win represents, for most teams a better than average month. For us we averaged 2.2 points per game back in October, if we can keep that rate up, we're almost certain to win this league.
To be fair though, if you look further to the right on the chart you see similar figures for Goal Difference. Here there is a slight difference between the month previous (2.2) and the month after (1.6). It does seem that there's a factor coming into play here that where a team loses, it loses big. For example Middlesbrough lost 3-0 to Southampton and Rotherham lost 4-0 to Southend. It may be that there's some dip in confidence when they do start losing or it may just be that they happened to be playing against other teams at the top of their game. The other factor effecting this is that our own Charlton had a whopping +10 goal difference before winning but Powell still didn't get the award because of Huddersfield's "Record".
Curse? I don't think so.
Comments
That'll do me.
It is cursed.