Sometimes your name's just not on it.

I trekked from Bromley to Northampton today. This was the first day of the new season. A lemming thing. It had to be done. The temperature was about 40 degrees, the train to Northampton packed... and delayed of course - bent rails apparently, because of the fierce sun.

The game itself was a disaster. Five chances which my grandma could have poked in and then we let in a soft goal and lose 0-1 to Lincoln City. The game got me thinking. We were so good, so on top and so brilliant... and yet, lost. Football fans know this feeling. You can play brilliantly, hit the post and the bar and be all over the opposition and then... it all goes pear-shaped for some unknown reason. It's as if the fates have aligned against you - the gods have deemed that today is not going to be your day and there is going to be a force field around the opposing goal with their keeper reacting like Spiderman on cocaine.

And it's not just in football that this madness happens.

It's the same in sales and marketing. Honestly. And I'm not just stretching a point. Well... maybe, a bit. OK, let's stretch.

You can do absolutely everything correctly and still get it all wrong (or right) and lose (or win) the sale for reasons unknown. The buyer suddenly just walks for no sane, logical reason (or makes the booking). It's all a total mystery leaving you bewildered, worried and considerably fed up ( or elated). But why? Has he or she gone crazy? Is he or she suddenly consumed by rampant stupidity (or wisdom)?

Of course not. The answer's simple... and yet complicated. It's that thing that we all hate. The thing that ruins all spreadsheets, programmes, analyses, predictions. It's... the human factor. We call it that, because we don't understand it.

We lose because of a random 'thing' that comes into play at the last moment and ruins everything. We can play our socks off, have 70% of the play, 16 shots on goal, be totally dominant and yet... The best thing is that we don't like blaming the human factor, initially. It's far easier to look up at the sky, shake your fist at the heavens, curse the gods loudly and howl how unfair life is.

In football, it's all human factor, of course, and this is what makes it great. Leicester can win the league and England can reach the World Cup semi-finals (maybe the gods had a hand in that, I have to admit), defying all predictions and logic.

In sales, it's all human factor too. We just say it's postmodern now, where anything can happen and will. A fancy term for something we don't understand. Sort of hide behind the chaos and absurdity of it all and call it a reason. Pretend we know what's in the grey cloud of uncertainty. Justifying the unpredictable with a sort of silly code where the illogic is in some way, logical. It's just another name we give to the gods of fate and chance.

Hang about, according to this line of thinking, isn't everything attributable to what we call the 'human factor', because, quite simply, humans are involved in pretty much everything? Certainly. This is what makes life worth living. The sheer nonsense of the daft result. Humans shaking their puny fists at the vastly superior computer which predicted otherwise.

So why bother with analytics, spreadsheets, charts, graphs etc. if it's all just on the flip of a coin in the end? Surely prediction systems are all just an expensive waste of time? A way of comforting ourselves and telling everybody that we will be all right, if we follow what the computer says. This is what it has become. A nice soft pillow of facts and figures, which tell us that it will be all right in the end.

Take the weather forecast on the telly. Carol constantly feeds us with computerised half-truths and mumbo-jumbo about what's going to happen in three or four days time - all based on what the computer decides as predictable trends. Nonsense and poppycock, I say. No computer in the world can tell you what the weather is going to do in three days. Best trust gut instinct and 'red-sky-at-night' etc. The human factor. But like lemmings again, we do as instructed by the telly weather gods, plan our movements accordingly and then, hey presto, it snows when the sun should shine, or it rains hard when it should be windy. And when this happens, the telly gods just blame unpredictable 'trends', global warming, Donald Trump, the jet stream, El Ninho, Jeremy Hunt, plain old bad luck... or the gods! And we shake our heads and then listen to Carol telling us all about the predicted hurricane at the end of the week. Madness.

I love this, of course. I really do. The unpredictable predictability of life. Why the sale goes belly up for no apparent reason, why we get three metres of rainfall one night without warning, why we lose to Lincoln City and why we should not trust what the computer tells us over what we 'feel'.

Yesterday, we walked away from the ground, sick as parrots and ruing our our lot in life. We won the game on all counts if you're examining the in-depth statistics, but we lost the game. Madness. Unfair. Unfair. Unfair. Blame the gods, fate, the weather, the Donald and postmodernism! They all hate us (as they did last season) and we don't deserve it. We never do.

Yar boo sucks!