If you had immediately paused the game after England had taken the lead in the 55th minute of their World Cup Semi-Final match against Argentina, and asked the Argentine players and coaches how they would like their opposition to play for the remainder of the match, they would have probably said something like this:

• Give up on offering any attacking threat.
• Have no desire to keep possession.
• Defend incredibly deep and narrow.
• Allow Messi to operate unencumbered on the right, and Fernandez on the edge of the penalty area.

Conveniently, for Argentina, this is exactly what England decided to do, with inevitable consequences.

Why would a high-quality, talented team with a lauded coach opt to play in the exact fashion that suited their opponents, at the worst possible time?

Plenty has been said and written about this, and will continue to be so. I wanted to take a slightly different angle and focus on the psychological drivers. What would make a group behave in this way, when they are on top in a match and on the cusp of a long-awaited World Cup Final appearance?

There were two recognisable behaviours at play – outcome bias and loss aversion.

Outcome bias is our propensity to judge the quality of a process or decision by the results it delivers. If the outcomes are positive, so must have been the reasoning behind it.

England’s decision to play ultra-defensively when taking the lead against Argentina was no doubt driven by the view that it had worked well previously in the tournament – particularly against Mexico – so it made sense to repeat the trick.

There are two major problems with outcome bias, however. The first is the role of luck: sometimes our results are good even when the decisions that led to them were terrible – we were just on the right side of chance. The second is context – just because the outcome was good in one context, it doesn’t mean the same approach will prove a success when the environment is different.

In England’s case, both elements were at play. They were undoubtedly a little fortunate to hang on against Mexico, but crucially the context was entirely different. Against Mexico they were playing with ten men against a solid but limited team. They suffered no such numeric disadvantage against Argentina, and the current World Cup holders have a far greater attacking threat.

If England were going to judge the likelihood of adopting an extremely cautious approach, they would have perhaps been better off looking at their experience in recent major tournament semi-finals and finals, rather than matches in this World Cup alone.*

The other evident psychological phenomenon was loss aversion. We feel the pain of loss far more acutely than the pleasure of equivalent gains, which can have a profound impact on our behaviour. As soon as England took the lead, they went from a team trying to win something to a team aiming not to lose what they had. This was signalled clearly to the players by coach Thomas Tuchel’s defensive substitutions, which seemed to scream at his charges: “whatever you do, do not throw this away”.

When we view something as a potential loss, it can cause fear and anxiety – our responses become emotional rather than thoughtful. It is clearly possible to play in a conservative fashion in an intelligent and considered way, but this is not what England did. Instead, they defended like a junior football team tasked with maintaining a lead – put lots of defenders on the pitch, sit as close to your own goal as possible and boot the ball away when the chance arises.

The lack of evident thought about how to manage a game or hold a lead suggests that choices were driven by an emotional fear of loss, compounded by coaching decisions.

There were many factors that led to England’s depressingly predictable exit, but falling victim to some powerful behavioural biases and being unable to make clear-headed decisions certainly contributed.

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* Outcome bias also means that if England’s approach against Argentina had worked out, it would have been regarded as a tactical masterclass.

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My first book has been published. The Intelligent Fund Investor explores the beliefs and behaviours that lead investors astray, and shows how we can make better decisions. You can get a copy here (UK) or here (US).