IIFT 2014 Question Paper

Read the following passage carefully and answer the questions given at the end.

No club in the English Premier League generated less money than Wigan Athletic. No club in the Premier League had so little history, or so few fans. Ever since 2005, when they won promotion to the top flight for the first time in their existence, Wigan started the season listening to prophecies of doom. 2013 was the year that football gravity finally caught up with them, and they returned to their 'rightful' place among the also-rans. Even as the naysayers and doubters were ignoring seven years of wrong forecasts and congratulating themselves for seeing Wigan's fate, this little David took out one last Goliath. Manchester City, in the FA Cup final.

In their book Why England Lose, the football journalist Simon Kuper and the economist Stefan Szymanski found that money matters a great deal for the success of football clubs. According to their calculations, 92 per cent of the differences in English football clubs' league position can be explained by a club's relative wage bill. It might not be the case that the team with the highest wage bill finishes top each and every season, but over the long term, the correlation is uncanny. At the other end of the table, it seems inevitable that, eventually, in football poverty will drag you down.

For Wigan, this was unfortunate. The annual reports into football's finances prepared by the accountants Deloitte must have made miserable reading for anyone who followed the club: their turnover, wages and attendance were all fractions of the Premier League's giants. And yet Wigan managed to avoid relegation for seven years. It was almost pathological. They defied the laws of football economics. They disobeyed the laws of football gravity.

Part of the reason Wigan managed to survive so long in the rarefied air of the Premier League is Dave Whelan, the local magnate who owns the club. Wigan's average attendance was just 17,000 - they rarely sold out their home ground, the DW Stadium, its initials a (self-awarded) tribute to the club's benefactor - on a par with the likes of Vitesse Arnhem or the average German second-division side, but half the Premier League's average. That's a considerable shortfall in revenue. It's the same when we look at television and commercial earnings: in 2010- 11, they earned £50.5 million from all of these streams - a tidy sum, to be sure, but half what the average Premier League team took. Only because of Whelan's enduring generosity did the club avoid sinking into the red. In 2011-12, he wrote off a £48 million loan to the club to balance the books. Financially, Wigan could not compete. And yet on the pitch they did.

In truth, Wigan did not dramatically outperform their wage bill, the gauge - for Kuper and Szymanski - of a manager's true impact. From 2006 to 2011, they finished eighteenth, fifteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth and sixteenth in the salary league, not far off their finishes in the actual division. Yet Wigan's continued survival was still, as the respected financial blog The Swiss Ramble had it, 'a minor modem miracle'. To explain why. we have to consider the odds that - given their spending on wages - Wigan would have been relegated well before the final axe fell in 2013. To do that properly, we need to calculate the odds of relegation as a function of a club's payroll.

The notional odds of relegation from the Premier League in any given season, for any team, are 15 per cent: three sides out of twenty endure the pain of demotion every year. But of course those three clubs are not simply drawn out of a hat: money does matter. More specifically, when we examined twenty years of club finances with the help of data from Deloitte, we found that a club's odds of relegation are 7.2 per cent if its wage spends is greater than average. In other words, you can halve the chances of being relegated just by spending a little more on your salaries than the average side. But for clubs that spend less, the odds of relegation shoot up from 15 to 21 per cent. For a team that spends as little as Wigan or less, these odds can even be as high as 44 per cent in any given season.

Spending less isn't a death sentence, but you are flirting with the chair. And spending less than the average year after year means the odds of relegation accumulate. For Wigan, the odds that they would be relegated at some point over the five Premier League seasons to 2012 were 95 per cent. It was, both mathematically and financially, almost a certainty. With wage bills four, two, and one and a half times Wigan's £40 million, Manchester United, Aston Villa and Fulham faced odds of demotion of 0, 31 and 69 per cent, respectively.

All this suggests that Wigan's continued survival was more than just good luck, and it was not simply attributable to their individual wage spending in any given year: the numbers were squarely against them. So Wigan's story is not just about money, but also how that money is put to use. By any standard measure Wigan had been a mediocre team for a long time. They conceded more goals than they scored in every season they were in the Premier League. They tended to have more possession than most of their peers at the wrong end of the table, but much of that came from the sterile domination of their own half. Roberto Martinez's team, though, had been doing more than just passing the ball around at the back and getting lucky. With the help of Ramzi Ben Said, a student at Cornell University, and the performance chalkboards published online by the British newspaper the Guardian in conjunction with Opta Sports, we tried to establish how Wigan went about scoring their goals in the 2010-11 season. Ramzi collected and coded a year's worth of data of attacking production (how each Premier League club scored their goals that season).

The data showed that the vast majority - 66 per cent - of the 1.4 goals a team scored in the average match that year came from open play. By far the smallest proportion of goals came from direct free kicks: just 2.8 per cent per team, per match. The average team produced one goal a game from open play, but needed to take thirty-five direct free kicks before finding the net that way.

But Martinez's Wigan was not your typical club. In 2010-11, they created goals in extremely unusual ways. They relied much less on traditional open-play goals than most, and did not bother with anything that resembled a patient build-up. In half their games they failed to score from open play at all. When they did, they tended to come from what are known among analysts as 'fast breaks' - lightning-quick counter-attacks. And the rest of their goals came from free kicks. Their output in both these categories was exceptional. They scored twice as many goals on the break as the average side, and they scored almost four times as many goals from free kicks.

Rather than choosing one or the other, Martinez as a manager seemed to have forsaken both high frequency - not scoring from the most common source of goals - as well as good odds - trying to score from low probability shots (free kicks) - as a way to win matches. Martinez was not trying to fight his opponents in a conventional way. Instead, he was beating them any way he could. Albert Larcada, an analyst at ESPN's Stats & Information Group, filled in the picture further. Using Opta's master file of play-by-play data, Larcada discovered Wigan were unusual in a number of other ways.

Not only did they score from fast breaks and free kicks, but when Larcada calculated the average distances from which Premier League clubs attempted shots that season. Wigan were the overall league leaders. Their average shooting distance was some twenty-six yards. This looked deliberate: their goals came from a longer distance than any of their peers - an average of 18.5 yards, way ahead of second-placed Tottenham, while their players Charles N'Zogbia and Hugo Rodallega both finished in the top five scorers from distance in the Premier League in 2010-11.

Martinez was thinking outside the box in the most literal fashion. Indeed, his team had the lowest number of goals scored from inside the penalty area of any side in the league - just twenty-eight, compared to Manchester United's sixty-nine. This sounds very defensive - hitting teams on the break, relying on set pieces and long-range shots - but Wigan's formations told a more nuanced story. Martinez's strategy relied on highly accurate long- range shooting, firing from distance - allowing his team to recover their defensive shape more easily - and persistence. He did not place any emphasis on corners - Wigan scored just one goal from a corner in the entire 2010-11 season - because it meant allowing his troops out of hiding and into open sight, leaving them vulnerable. Martinez was playing guerrilla football. He had his team lie in wait for their opponents and then punish them on the counter-attack. He employed sharpshooters, to let fly from distance, and snipers, to hit free kicks. His team were adaptable, unpredictable.

Read the following passage carefully and answer the questions given at the end.

The tight calendar had calmed him, as did the constant exertion of his authority as a judge. How he relished his power over the classes that had kept his family pinned under their heels for centuries - like the stenographer, for example, who was a Brahmin. There he was, now crawling into a tiny tent to the side, and there was Jemubhai reclining like a king in a bed carved out of teak, hung with mosquito netting.

"Bed tea", the cook would shout "Baaad tee". He would sit up to drink.

6:30: he'd bathe in water that had been heated over the fire so it was redolent with the smell of wood smoke and flecked with ash. With a dusting of powder he graced his newly washed face, with a daub of pomade, his hair. Crunched up toast like charcoal from having been toasted upon the flame, with marmalade over the burn.

8:30: he rode into the fields with the local officials and everyone else in the village going along for fun. Followed by an orderly holding an umbrella over his head to shield him from the glare, he measured the fields and checked to make sure his yield estimate matched the headman's statement. Farms were growing less than ten maunds an acre of rice or wheat, and at two rupees a maund, every single man in a village, sometimes, was in debt to the bania. (Nobody knew that Jemubhai himself was noosed, of course, that long ago in the little town of Piphit in Gujarat, money-lenders had sniffed out in him a winning combination of ambition and poverty ... that they still sat waiting cross-legged on a soiled mat in the market, snapping their toes, cracking their knuckles in anticipation of repayment .... )

2.00: after lunch, the judge sat at his desk under a tree to try cases, usually in a cross mood, for he disliked the informality, hated the splotch of leaf shadow on him imparting an untidy
mongrel look. Also, there was a worse aspect of contamination and corruption: he heard cases in Hindi, but they were recorded in Urdu by the stenographer and translated by the judge into a second record in English, although his own command of Hindi and Urdu was tenuous; the witnesses who couldn't read at all put their thumbprints at the bottom of "Read Over and Acknowledged Correct", as instructed. Nobody could be sure how much of the truth had fallen between languages, between languages and illiteracy; the clarity that justice demanded was nonexistent. Still, despite the leaf shadow and language confusion, he acquired a fearsome reputation for his speech that seemed to belong to no language at all, and for his face like a mask that conveyed something beyond human fallibility. The expression and manner honed here would carry him, eventually, all the way to the high court in Lucknow where, annoyed by lawless pigeons shuttlecocking about those tall, shadowy halls, he would preside, white powdered wig over white powdered face, hammer in hand.

4:30: tea had to be perfect, drop scones made in the frying pan. He would embark on them with forehead wrinkled, as if angrily mulling over something important, and then, as it would into his retirement, the draw of the sweet took over, and his stern work face would hatch an expression of tranquillity.

5:30: out he went into the countryside with his fishing rod or gun. The countryside was full of game; lariats of migratory birds lassoed the sky in October; quail and partridge with lines of babies strung out behind whirred by like nursery toys that emit sound with movement; pheasant - fat foolish creatures, made to be shot - went scurrying through the bushes. The thunder of gunshot roiled away, the leaves shivered, and he experienced the profound silence that could come only after violence. One thing was always missing, though, the proof of the pudding, the prize of the action. the manliness in manhood, the partridge for the pot. because he returned with - Nothing!

He was a terrible shot.

8:00: the cook saved his reputation, cooked a chicken, brought it forth, proclaimed it "roast bastard", just as in the Englishman's favourite joke book of natives using incorrect English. But sometimes, eating that roast bustard, the judge felt the joke might also be on him, and he called for another rum, took a big gulp, and kept eating feeling as if he were eating himself, since he, too, was (was he?) part of the fun ....

9:00: sipping Ovaltine, he filled out the registers with the day's gleanings. The Petromax lantern would be lit - what a noise it made - insects fording the black to dive - bomb him with soft flowers (moths), with iridescence (beetles). Lines, columns, and squares. He realized truth was best looked at in tiny aggregates, for many baby truths could yet add up to one big size unsavory lie. Last, in his diary also to be submitted to his superiors, he recorded the random observations of a cultured man, someone who was observant, schooled in literature as well as economics; and he made up hunting triumphs: two partridge ... one deer with thirty- inch horns....

11:00: he had a hot water bottle in winter, and, in all seasons, to the sound of the wind buffeting the trees and the cook's snoring, he fell asleep.

Read the following passage carefully and answer the questions given at the end.

The movement to expel the Austrians from Italy and unite Italy under a republican government had been gaining momentum while Garibaldi was away. There was a growing clamour, not just from Giuseppe Mazzini's republicans, but from moderates as well, for a General capable of leading Italy to independence. Even the King of Piedmont, for whom Garibaldi was still an outlaw under sentence of death, subscribed to an appeal for a sword for the returning hero. Meanwhile, the 'year of revolutions', 1848, had occurred in which Louis Philippe had been toppled from the French throne. In Austria, an uprising triggered off insurrections in Venice and Milan, and the Austrian garrisons were forced out. The King of Piedmont, Charles Albert ordered his troops to occupy these cities. There had also been insurrections in Sicily, causing the King Ferdinand II, to grant major constitutional freedoms in 1849, prompting both the Pope and Charles Albert to grant further concessions.

Meanwhile, largely ignorant of these developments, Garibaldi was approaching Italy at a leisurely pace, arriving at Nice on 23 June 1848 to a tumultuous reception. The hero declared himself willing to fight and lay down his life for Charles Albert, who he now regarded as a bastion of Italian nationalism.

Mazzini and the republicans were horrified, regarding this as outright betrayal: did it reflect Garibaldi's innate simple-mindedness, his patriotism in the war against Austria, or was it part of a deal with the monarchy? Charles Albert had pardoned Garibaldi, but to outward appearances he was still very wary of the General and the Italian Legion he had amassed of 150 'brigands'. The two men met near Mantua, and the King appeared to dislike him instantly. He suggested that Garibaldi's men should join his army and that Garibaldi should go to Venice and captain a ship as a privateer against the Austrians.

Garibaldi, meanwhile, met his former hero Mazzini for the first time, and again the encounter was frosty. Seemingly rebuffed on all sides, Garibaldi considered going to Sicily to fight King Ferdinand II of Naples, but changed his mind when the Milanese offered him the post of General - something they badly needed when Charles Albert's Piedmontese army was defeated at Custoza by the Austrians. With around 1,000 men, Garibaldi marched into the mountains at Varese, commenting bitterly: 'The King of Sardinia may have a crown that he holds on to by dint of misdeeds and cowardice, but my comrades and I do not wish to hold on to our lives by shameful actions'.

The King of Piedmont offered an armistice to the Austrians and all the gains in northern Italy were lost again. Garibaldi returned to Nice and then across to Genoa, where he learned that, in September 1848, Ferdinand II had bombed Messina as a prelude to invasion - an atrocity which caused him to be dubbed 'King Bomba'. Reaching Livorno he was diverted yet again and set off across the Italian peninsula with 350 men to come to Venice's assistance, but on the way, in Bologna, he learned that the Pope had taken refuge with King Bomba. Garibaldi promptly altered course southwards towards Rome where he was greeted once again as a hero. Rome proclaimed itself a Republic. Garibaldi's Legion had swollen to nearly 1,300 men, and the Grand Duke of Tuscany fled Florence before the advancing republican force.

However, the Austrians marched southwards to place the Grand Duke of Tuscany back on his throne. Prince Louis Napoleon of France despatched an army of 7,000 men under General Charles Oudinot to the port of Civitavecchia to seize the city. Garibaldi was appointed as a General to defend Rome.

The republicans had around 9,000 men, and Garibaldi was given control of more than 4,000 to defend the Janiculum Hill, which was crucial to the defence of Rome, as it commanded the city over the Tiber. Some 5,000 well-equipped French troops arrived on 30 April 1849 at Porta Cavallegeri in the old walls of Rome, but tailed to get through, and were attacked from behind by Garibaldi, who led a baton charge and was grazed by a bullet slightly on his side. The French lost 500 dead and wounded, along with some 350 prisoners, to the Italians, 200 dead and wounded. It was a famous victory, wildly celebrated by the Romans into the night, and the French signed a tactical truce.

However, other armies were on the march: Bomba's 12,500-strong Neapolitan army was approaching from the south, while the Austrians had attacked Bologna in the north. Garibaldi too, a force out of Rome and engaged in a flanking movement across the Neapolitan army's rear at Castelli Romani; the Neapolitans attacked and were driven off leaving 50 dead. Garibaldi accompanied the Roman General, Piero Roselli, in an attack on the retreating Neapolitan army. Foolishly leading a patrol of his men right out in front of his forces, he tried to stop a group of his cavalry retreating and fell under their horses, with the enemy slashing at him with their sabres. He was rescued by his legionnaires, narrowly having avoided being killed, but Roselli had missed the chance to encircle the Neapolitan army.

Garibaldi boldly wanted to carry the fight down into the Kingdom of Naples, but Mazzini, who by now was effectively in charge of Rome, ordered him back to the capital to face the danger of Austrian attack from the north. In fact, it was the French who arrived on the outskirts of Rome first, with an army now reinforced by 30,000. Mazzini realized that Rome could not resist and ordered a symbolic stand within the city itself, rather than surrender, for the purposes of international propaganda and to keep the struggle alive, whatever the cost. On 3 June the French arrived in force and seized the strategic country house, Villa Pamphili.

Garibaldi rallied his forces and fought feverishly to retake the villa up narrow and steep city streets, capturing it, then losing it again. By the end of the day, the sides had 1,000 dead between them. Garibaldi once again had been in the thick of the fray, giving orders to his troops and - fighting, it was said, like a lion. Although beaten 'off for the moment, the French imposed a siege in the morning, starving the city of provisions and bombarding its beautiful centre.

On 30 June the French attacked again in force, while Garibaldi, at the head of his troops, fought back ferociously. But there was no prospect of holding the French off indefinitely, and Garibaldi, decided to take his men out of the city to continue resistance in the mountains. Mazzini fled to Britain while Garibaldi remained to fight for the cause. He had just 4,000 men, divided into two legions, and faced some 17,000 Austrians and Tuscans in the north, 30,000 Neapolitans and Spanish in the south, and 40,000 French in the west. He was being directly pursued by 8,000 French and was approaching Neapolitan and Spanish divisions of some 18,000 men. He stood no chance whatever. The rugged hill country was ideal, however, for his style of irregular guerrilla warfare, and he manoeuvred skilfully, marching and counter-marching in different directions, confounding his pursuers before finally aiming for Arezzo in the north. But his men were deserting in droves and local people were hostile to his army: he was soon reduced to 1500 men who struggled across the high mountain passes to San Marino where he found temporary. refuge.

The Austrians, now approaching, demanded that he go into exile in America. He was determined to fight on and urged the ill and pregnant Anita, his wife, to stay behind in San Marino, but she would not hear of it. The pair set off with 200 loyal soldiers along the mountain tracks to the Adriatic coast, from where Garibaldi intended to embark for Venice which was still valiantly holding out against the Austrians. They embarked aboard 13 fishing boats and managed to sail to within 50 miles of the Venetian lagoon before being spotted by an Austrian flotilla and fired upon.

Only two of Garibaldi's boats escaped. He carried Anita through the shallows to a beach and they moved further inland. The ailing Anita was placed in a cart and they reached a farmhouse, where she died. Her husband broke down into inconsolable wailing and she was buried in a shallow grave near the farmhouse, but was transferred to a churchyard a few days later. Garibaldi had no time to lose; he and his faithful companion Leggero escaped across the Po towards Ravenna.

At last Garibaldi was persuaded to abandon his insane attempts to reach Venice by sea and to return along less guarded routes on the perilous mountain paths across the Apennines towards the western coast of Italy. He visited his family in Nice for an emotional reunion with his mother and his three children - but lacked the courage to tell them what had happened to their mother.