If someone bakes a cake for you, the question of why they baked it is different to the question of how they baked it.  They may have baked it because it was your birthday, or you paid them to bake it.  But you may or may not know the method or the ingredients they used in the baking.

Is there a similar difference in a footy match?  The Lions comfortably beat the Swans.  Is the question why did they win different to the question of how did they win?  Yes.  They won because they played much better footy on the day.  The reasons for that go back far and wide.  Why is different to how?

We do know that before the game, no one knew who would win, and very few were confident in their prediction.  The two sides looked so evenly matched.  It was as close to even money as you can get.  Yet on the day, it was ‘not even close’ – the phrase Mitch McConnell used to describe the result in the 2020 U S election.

The fallacy of history is to succumb to the delusion that because something did happen, it had to happen.  This is not so in live action.  At the start of a game, the players do not know how it will end.  Punters do not know how a race will end.  The players in Hamlet know what’s coming.  The players in the Wallabies v England Test had no idea of who would close out the test at the 84-minute mark, or how they would come to do it – in a spectacle that will live long in memory.

Yet we see this fallacy all the time in games.  A team gets up by a chancy point on the bell, and we get a raft of reasons why they won, blurred with descriptions of how they did it.

The Battle of Gettysburg was a ‘damn’d close run thing’ (to quote Wellington on Waterloo).  The Union prevailed, but it could have gone to the South, if one of the thousands of bullets fired on the second day had deviated by six inches to take out Colonel Joshua Chamberlin, the hero of Little Round Top.

History is made by people – and by chance.

What about elections, then?  Before the event, no one knows who will win.  After the count, everyone knows who did win.  (Putting to one side rogues and lunatics.)  People seeking to predict the outcome of an election are speculating.  Most commentators thought the last U S election was too close to call.  But the last ten years have shown just how speculative is this kind of crystal ball gazing.

But if we inquire after the event, how do we know why so many millions voted how they did?  We know how they voted – both personally and as a supporter of a party or candidate – but we don’t know and we will never know why they voted as they did.  We are back to speculation.

And many inside and outside the US simply cannot fathom how millions can wish to appoint to a position of trust a man proven – proven – to be utterly untrustworthy.

And yet day after day, the pundits trek to the oracle at Delphi to tell us why events unfolded as they did. 

That sort of speculation looks to me to be delusional.