DECEMBER 6 ― There is a train of thought, particularly popular among Barcelona fans, that Real Madrid manager Zinedine Zidane is extremely lucky.

Conversely, another increasingly common line of argument suggests that Manchester United boss Jose Mourinho is exactly the opposite and suffering from a rare bout of rank bad luck.

Both claims are easy to defend.

Firstly, Zidane’s Real have managed to put together an unbeaten run of 33 games, stretching back eight months, despite often not playing very well during that period.

The latest example of Zidane’s "luck”, indeed, came as recently as this weekend when his team escaped with a point from their most important game of the season so far, the Clasico trip to Barcelona, thanks to a last minute header from Sergio Ramos.

On the other side of the coin, a day later Mourinho and his United team were on the receiving end of a similar scenario as Everton grabbed a scarcely deserved draw at Goodison Park with a debatable last minute penalty from Leighton Baines.

For both teams, it was by no means the first time they have benefitted from/suffered from good/bad luck (delete as appropriate).

Zidane, for example, was able to lift the Champions League trophy at the end of last season after his team was granted an exceptionally smooth passage to the final, avoiding heavyweight opposition and instead being paired against Roma, Wolfsburg and out-of-form Manchester City in the knockout rounds.

Then, in the final against local rivals Atletico, Real quickly ran out of steam after a strong start and ended up holding on for a 1-1 draw which allowed them to triumph in the most arbitrary manner possible, a penalty shoot-out.

This season has been similar, with Zidane’s team only maintaining their unbeaten record thanks to a string of late goals, often coming at the end of games in which they have played particularly poorly ― as noted by their former sporting director Jorge Valdano, nobody plays bad football as well as Real Madrid.

 United, on the other hand, have been playing well. Really well, many of their supporters have been anxious to tell me, echoing the views of their manager Mourinho, who has constantly bemoaned his team’s failure to get the rewards they have deserved.

Sunday’s tie at Everton was the sixth time in the last eight Premier League games that United have ended up drawing, and three of those have featured equalising goals by the opposition scored inside the final ten minutes.

On the face of it, one could quite easily conclude that Zidane’s Real Madrid have been very lucky, and that Mourinho’s Manchester United have been very unlucky.

At some point, however, these occurrences cease to be a matter of mere fortune. If something happens often enough for a discernible and consistent pattern to emerge, there are probably good reasons for it.

Real, for example, have now scored no less than 14 goals in the last ten minutes of their games this season. Could anyone seriously claim that’s only a matter of luck? Surely there are other factors at play which allow a team to score important late goals in roughly half their matches?

As the golfer Gary Player noted in an often-recycled quote: "The more I practise, the luckier I get.”

The more Real Madrid attack the opposition, the luckier they get. The more they keep on pushing themselves in the hope of scraping a positive result, the luckier they get. The more they refuse to accept losing even when they are playing badly, the luckier they get.

Similarly, rather than Manchester United being unlucky, they just need to learn how to close out or kill off a game.

Rather than repeatedly putting themselves in positions where the opposition still have a chance of gaining unmerited reward, Mourinho’s team should be turning their dominance into goals and putting the result beyond doubt long before the final minutes tick around.

In both cases, the late goals for and against are probably mainly down to a case of self-perpetuating confidence.

In Real’s case, they have grown so accustomed to rescuing seemingly hopeless situations that they are starting to regard their late goals as inevitable, as long as they keep on believing ― many of Sir Alex Ferguson’s teams at United benefitted from that mind-set.

And for Mourinho’s United, their poor start to the season and the constant swirl of negative publicity surrounding their manager has created a lack of confidence, a fear of how things can possibly go wrong yet again this time.

Both these situations can turn around, of course ― one of the most compelling things about sport is its propensity to make participants experience a dramatic change in fortunes without prior warning.

Many things can make that happen. A sudden dip or surge in confidence can be signalled by a missed penalty, a refereeing decision, an injury, a brilliant save or a terrible miss ― or even just a slice of plain old luck.

* This is the personal opinion of the columnist.