‘If we had just scored when we had that chance it would have been so different.’ How often do you hear that after a game of football? Nearly every time. It is either a manager, a player or a pundit bemoaning a missed chance – not to mention the media and fans. It may seem an exaggeration to say this, but one chance can change a game, and make all the difference, and whilst I am not in the business of criticising someone for missing a chance during a game, no one can underestimate just how crucial that goal could have been.

Long have Arsenal been accused of passing more times than a cast member of TOWIE gets a spray tan, and failing to score when it counts, and before RVP became the MVP, their lack of clinical finishing cost them.

Anyone with a vague notion of intelligence – and I don’t mean MENSA here, just Wayne Rooney level – you know reading ok, grunting occasionally, that kind of thing – can point out to you after a game where a chance that could have made it all so different was missed.

In the only big game Real Madrid will ever play in a season if you listen to some English people – El Clasico – at 1–0 up, they had a golden chance to go two clear, and that would have made everything oh so different. Instead the chance was spurned and Barca went straight down the other end to equalise. The game was turned in the blink of an eye, and it was clinical finishing down one end, and the lack of it down the other that did that.

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Too many missed chances can see heads dropping and the overall mentality of the team dipping. Not to mention the opposition will be aware of the fact that if they manage to go a goal to the good, they are probably safe and there is little chance of being pegged back due to the mental issues created from being tagged as a team who can’t finish.

Likewise this can happen to an individual player – the number of strikers who down the years have gone through a poor run of form and let this affect them, subsequently struggling to  pick both themselves and their form up – they can still have the touch and the movement but simply cannot hit a barn door – Torres is the prime example here, and it is a long time before the player can forget the multiple or in Nando’s case the million missed chances playing over and over in his head.

Whether it be a team or a player who is suffering because of missed chances and a lack of clinical finishing,  it is not just that one game and three points it can cost. It is easier said than done for a player to put these things out of their head, and a complex can develop affecting the team and the individual for a long time to come should they let it.

All too often people criticise players for being lazy and not doing anything except be in the right place and the right time to score goals – Van Nistelrooy being a prime example – but I would take a player who stuck the ball in the back of the net every day of the week over one who wasn’t a clinical finisher and cost the team not only goals but points to boot.

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