Mild Rover wrote:I think that is something you often see with successful people, especially at the top of a hierarchy when they're no longer obliged to listen to alternative views. Just as unsuccessful people tend to overestimate the role luck has played in their lives, the successful (naturally) tend to downplay it in their personal narrative. And the idea of a superman is more appealing or easier to accept for a lot of other people than the idea that there's a big slice of arbitrary serendipity running through events - it's the same thing that fuels conspiracy theories.
On reading your post, three examples sprang to mind - thatcher and the poll tax, Blair and WMD, and Allam and 'look at my record'. Trust in their own judgement, which they see as having been thoroughly in the past, blinds them to evidence pointing in the other direction.
I don't for one second think Pearson has 'lost it' like that. But looking back at the thread somebody dragged up from 2011, that sort of stuff isn't going to help ground a fella. And really somebody close to him needs to point out the flaws in his 'Gentle's fault' story, as they're obvious even to people who want to think the best of AP.
The other side of the coin, of course, is that with just one more good performance, you'd have won the cup within 2 years of his arrival and I'm sure he'd still be 'the man'. He just needed a bit more luck at a key moment.
Hull FC now seems like a classic case of "Groupthink" where a boss surrounds himself with people he knows aren't going to question him and will look for any number of alternate sources on which to apportion blame. The article in today's HDM is evidence of this.
