Almost all of my colleagues had put very, very low odds on the OPERA experiment’s result being correct — not because the people who did the measurement were considered incompetent or stupid, but because (a) doing experimental physics is very challenging; (b) this particular result was especially implausible; and (as everyone in the field knows) (c) most experiments with a shocking result turn out to be wrong, though it can take months or years to find the mistake.
I haven’t seen the vitriol or scorn the author mentions, but I don’t read everything. Complex experiments are hard, as he notes. In the kinds of experiments I’ve worked on we’ve spent lots of time chasing down subtle vacuum problems and electronic problems like ground loops — if your circuitry has a “loop” configuration it acts as an antenna, converting changes in magnetic fields into voltages (from Faraday’s law) and picking up the noise radiated by all of the electronics in your lab.
“Loose cable” was not high on the list of problems by the betting bystanders, since “Einstein was wrong” and “GPS is fouled up” sounded much sexier, and one might not expect such a mundane-sounding problem to either survive or cause these problems, but there is subtlety there. (I can recall a recent problem with an sma connector with a bad thread — it felt properly tight, but wasn’t. Caused all sorts of weird signals, and took an extra set of eyes to help spot the problem.)
They still need to confirm that this was indeed the source of the anomaly. That’s just good science.