A Weekly Rhetoric

As a sports fan, this is a question I find myself asking a lot. Here in the UK, I believe the waters couldn't be any murkier as far as peoples attitudes towards decent sporting competition is concerned. Here's why:

Part of the Great British psyche is to reward the heroic losers, and woe betide any team or sportsman who actually achieves in his, her or their field, as they're all doomed. Take Lewis Hamilton, for example, on his way to being the first ever rookie to win the Formula One World Championship, crushed under the weight of national expectation, and he bottled it. Not to mention his team being punished for the Forumla 1 Spying Row with Ferrari. Take Tim Henman, always crushed under the weight of expectation when he played at Wimbledon, and therefore never won (famously losing to Goran Ivanisevic after a rain-delay, who went on to win the championship - you can't argue with destiny....). When England were in the World Cup in 2006, the weight of expectation was that we only should turn-up and the other 31 teams shouldn't bother. Cue England going out in a penalty shoot-out to Portugal after a string of sub-standard performances, mainly because, I feel, the national attitude spilling over onto the players.

Primarily, my sport is football (or soccer, if you're American), and with the English Premier League being stale and restricted to the same four teams battling out for the top four places, it's become a procession. Surely this is getting boring for Liverpool, Man Utd, Chelsea and Arsenal fans too? These are the four "best" teams in the UK, among the "best" in Europe, if not the world (and by "best" I mean "richest"). So my rhetoric is, if you're effectively buying the level of competativeness, then where's the sport in that? One of the reasons I like American Sport is that it's built towards parity, the worst teams get the first draft picks at the beginning of a new season, and therefore are given a fighting chance to put right their wrongs of the previous season (yes, i'm ware of the irony of drug cheats too). There are salary-caps in place (save for some "star" players), and this is something which football needs urgently. If only to temper the attitude of the players, who frankly are cacooned enough from reality as to have no clue how to function outside of the busom of their agents.

Almost every sport is rife with excessive gamesmanship and cheating, which is so far beyond the spirit of sporting competition as to defy comprehension. When Paula Radcliffe pulled out of the Athens Olympic marathon, she described it as "A bereavement", it's a foot-race Honey, not a death! Stop taking it too seriously.

In the week that a large proportion of the British population were miraculous survivors of the strongest earthquake to hit these shores in 30 years, and by "survive", I mean most of them slept through it. I felt it necessary to write a blog on the colossal overreaction there was to both this story, and the collapse of Northern Rock Building Society.

There has been a worrying trend in recent years, and I use the word "worrying" entirely deliberately, for the people in news broadcasting to insert something relatively banal, and blow it up to be something incredibly worrying. Firstly, let me point out that the collapse of Northern Rock is not in itself a banal story, but the collapse itself was not the story on which they were reporting at the beginning of the day. The story they were reporting on was the fact that Northern Rock had been refused an emergency loan by the Bank Of England. As we were watching that morning I said the following sentence (and this is no word of a lie): "You watch, later today there'll be people queuing out of the door to take their money out".

And that's exactly what happened.

Put simply, widespread panic. Which I believe was largely unwarranted, because media reports on a story exacerbated the problem and brought about the collapse of the bank.

Fast-forward to this week, when at 1am, my house shook to the first earthquake I've ever experienced on these shores (I've experienced a tremor on the Island of Crete in 2003). Obviously we in the UK are not used to such things, but sheesh, the sum total of the casualties from the UK-wide "natural disaster", was one guy who suffered a broken pelvis. Spare a thought for the people who've suffered real earthquakes and lost family members, property and possesions. I mean, really.

It's time we all got a grip. Once upon a time we were furnished with the Great British Stiff Upper Lip (tm) and we never succumbed to such frivolity. This is what we need to get back to, less panic, more pragmatic, it's what made Britain great.