AND SO ENDS another Six Nations, which was once again at testament to the awesome power of spite.
Rugby is like all professional sports in that is now drenched in dowdy jargon like processes and KPIs, but even as its game-plans become preposterously sophisticated and its coaches talk like animated LinkedIn pages, it remains a business fuelled by slight and grievance.
Some good, old-fashioned, we’re-no-longer-the-whipping boys-and-we’ll-do-them-for-yis-today spite.
At heart, professional sport remains an exercise in proving people wrong.
Ireland didn’t win the Grand Slam because England had an overwhelming numerical advantage of people to shut up. Rugby’s appeal comes from the persistent influence of emotion: pour enough of it into your game and you’ll start winning collisions, and the team that wins the most collisions wins the game. England simply had more of the stuff.
In the immediate aftermath of the game, as Ben Earl used his last shards of breath to stab sarcastically at people who had told him he was part of the worst national team ever, it became apparent that so many people though England were so shit that they were simply unbeatable.
The only Irishmen who lost that game were the pundits, and Earl later admitted his team were fired up by Jamie Heaslip’s comments that England could only win if Ireland were reduced to 14 or 13 men.
But Heaslip and his pundits were only doing their jobs, as they gave the only prediction they could on the basis of form, quality and logic. England could only win if enough people told them they could only lose… these are the delicious catch-22s that keep us rapt to sport.
This is not to say the principle of proving people wrong is a guranteed success.
We’ve spend years manufacturing live ammunition and delivered it directly to the Scottish rugby team, and they are well aware of our generosity, as Gregor Townsend and Stuart Hogg reference their team’s standing in Ireland in Full Contact on Netflix.
And yet they’ve just lost a third-straight game to us since Hogg told his team that “We’re due these fuckers one.”
This is not just a rugby thing. High Performance folk will tell you this kind of motivation is unsustainable, but it’s still powerful at all levels. Virgil van Dijk, the epitome of detached, supercilious brilliance, celebrated the Carabao Cup final by telling a dressing-room comment that “they thought I was finished.” He has since resiled from those comments, presumably for fear too many people will agree with him and he will run out of doubters.
No amount of success appears to be enough to quell the prevalence of spite. Pep Guardiola and Manchester City, whose relentless winning has been matched with universal admiration for their style in doing so, appear haunted by the fact they get less praise in victory than Liverpool. In this context, Trent Alexander-Arnold’s recent “our success means more” comment was the work of an expert troll.
The splitting of professional golf, meanwhile, appears to have been largely driven by personal enmity and one-upmanship. Alan Shipnuck has written the definitive book on LIV and within it he wonders aloud whether it would ever have happened had LIV frontman Greg Norman simply won the Masters and thus earned acceptance into golf’s tightest sanctum.
Rory McIlroy’s gradual descent from the moral high ground on all of this is showing his exceptions to LIV appear mostly to have been a personal exception to Greg Norman. Last week he said Norman had “done a disservice” to PIF governor Yasir Al-Rumayyan, neglecting to acknowledge that, of the two of them, Norman isn’t the one to have spent billions of dollars funding the whole thing in an effort to improve Saudi Arabia’s global standing and strategic political ambitions.
The Spite of Ben Earl was a discomfiting thing for us to reflect upon, given we are usually the ones happy to be written off.
The desire to prove people wrong can be said to a founding element of our national character, going back to the moment Sinn Féin general secretary Páraig Ó Caoimh stood beside Michael Collins and told a reporter of his party’s political ambitions by roaring, “‘Vengeance, bejaysus, vengeance!”
Grievance and point-making is of course the true lifeblood of the GAA. It appears that footballers were first written off on stone tablets, while hurlers have paid homage to Cu Chulainn by ramming words rather than sliotars down throats.
It remains as integral to the experience as ever. As backroom teams expand, it’s a wonder that managers haven’t yet found space for a freelance journalist happy to write a few mildly critical pieces that can then be pinned to the dressing room wall.
John Kiely took the entire thing in a bold new direction last year by trying to find criticism within enthusiastic praise, telling the media they were indulging in a grand conspiracy to “soften up” his Limerick hurlers. All we were doing was printing the results.
Alive to the radioactive power of criticism or confidence, most sportspeople now live in fear of equipping their opponent with any kind of ammunition at all. This has led interviews and press conferences entering their current post-modern phase, at which everyone gathers to watch someone move their mouth while saying nothing.
But while these ancient instincts makes pro sport relatable to us all, it also goes to show how few lessons sport can actually teach us in our own professional lives.
Most of us must rely entirely on self-motivation, from which an enormous industry has bloomed. Unlike sportspeople, we don’t have access to enemy provocation: we would never have heard the name Steven Bartlett if we all had someone in the office willing to stand up and insult the quality of our work.
Instead, we are doomed to rely on ourselves.
