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Loading ...You’re right — it is a great piece. Atherton’s become a fine sports journalist.
Sport’s glorious futility
By Will last year, at the end of March Leave a comment on this post
No, there is little to be gained by cancelling. Indeed, surely the whole point of sport is to act as a necessary counterpoint to the grim realities of life. We know that death is a part of life because we see it, in one form or another, every day. Like drugs and alcohol, sport provides an escape from the routine absurdity of everyday existence - and thankfully without any of the side effects.
It gives us the chance to experience the best that life has to offer, usually without serious consequences. We win, we lose, and then we go home and get on with life.
We submit to sport’s arcane rules and regulations and rituals. We recognise that we will need to show courage and skill, and we train hard for the event knowing that we are undertaking an ultimately futile task. It is this futility that explains sport’s universal appeal, that and the desire to satisfy a basic human urge to play.
Sport loses its appeal when it is invested with fake importance. This is why English football engenders scant respect: the managers who snarl and spit at players and officials from the sidelines; the players who confuse competitiveness with sometimes vicious intent; and the supporters who cannot cope with the fact that in sport there must nearly always be a loser.
They have all clearly forgotten that Bill Shankly had his tongue firmly planted in his Scottish cheek when he said that football was more important than life or death.
Sport is not more important. And it won’t help to bring Woolmer back, but it might help us to cope.
One of the most insightful, and certainly the most reasoned and balanced article that I’ve read so far on the Woolmer murder and why cricket must go on. But it also re-enforces the often forgotten notion that cricket is a game. Predictably, it’s by Atherton, and it’s a superb read.
Tags: bob-woolmer, football, futility, ICC, Mike-Atherton |
4 Responses to “Sport’s glorious futility”
March 25th, 2007 at 8.11 am
March 25th, 2007 at 9.08 am
Mike Atherton is a class act. What’s he going to be like when he reaches Richie Benaud’s age?
March 25th, 2007 at 12.06 pm
Who’d have ever guessed that media-shy (media-petrified, rather) Athers the skipper would be Athers the sharp insightful journalist?
March 26th, 2007 at 9.39 am
Pamela, my theory is that Athers has drawn a very sharp line under his career as a cricketer, and now no longer even feels like the same person. I read a profile of him a year or so ago, and it said that in his home there are absolutely no mementoes or any indication that he was an England cricketer. Whether that was because it was quite a traumatic time for him (as he said recently at a public function, he played for England when England won “fuck-all”) or some other reason, I don’t know.
I suspect he now sees himself as someone who used to run with the hares but now hunts with the hounds, which has shifted his loyalty on to the reading public, rather than his previous loyalty as a cricketer. Occasionally though, he makes rather revealing comments: just recently he was talking about England players at press conferences and said there were two types of press conference: one, where a jaunty newcomer like Paul Nixon turns up with a spring in his step and a twinkle in his eye and is prepared to spar and banter with the journalists; the other is where the paranoid old hand (with the inference that this old hand is also on the losing side) turns up and waits and pauses after each question, searching their brain for an answer which won’t be misread, and censoring out any nuance that shouldn’t be there as it might get him into trouble. Very revealing.
However I wish that during the last Ashes tour he might have turned back to his experience of being on the losing side to give us some insight into what it’s like in the losing camp and how losing can become a habit or a terrible spiral no matter how talented you are. I wished he had written something about that, rather than just joining in with the other hacks and throwing round adjectives like pathetic, spoilt, cowardly, weak, shameful, which got a bit boring after a while. I wanted to hear some of his insights about losing (and losing, I believe, can be just as perplexing and inexplicable as winning and vice versa).
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