Don’t hate the player, hate the game: why liking the opposition is part of the sport
I had intended to start this column with praise for how top-level sport has responded to the absence of crowds. However, I now see that Eddie Jones has blamed England’s “sub-standard” start to the Six Nations on the empty stadium, which has apparently kept the players’ “arousal level” low. He quotes some research on a German football club which suggests that its “arousal level” has been 20 per cent below par.
Nevertheless, the Scotland team at Twickenham seemed to have got its “arousal level” pretty high. Indeed the same may be said of the young Italian side last week – despite the defensive errors which let England score some too easy tries. Moreover, at Murrayfield last Saturday – soon after the final whistle at Twickenham – Scotland and Wales gave us a match of high intensity and skill. It was a game that will stay in the memory long after many internationals played before a full house of fans have slipped into oblivion. Though Sunday’s Ireland-France game in Dublin wasn’t as good or exciting as the Murrayfield match, I doubt one could reasonably complain about the “arousal level” there either. So perhaps Jones’s preparation of his team is more to blame than the absence of a crowd for “sub-standard performances”.
Fifty years ago, not quite to the day, there was a classic Scotland-Wales match at Murrayfield, won 19-18 by Wales thanks to John Taylor’s conversion of an injury-time try by Gerald Davies on the right wing. That was a wonderful Welsh team, packed with most of the brightest stars of the Lions side that would defeat the All Blacks a few months later. The Scotland side, captained by Peter Brown, wasn’t bad either; it went on to win at Twickenham. But the Welsh match – which also featured a try by Barry John ghosting through a bamboozled defence – was one of these rare games which left thousands of supporters of the beaten side wiping their tears away and saying, “I don’t really mind losing a match of that quality”.
Last Saturday’s game invited and – I would guess – has received the same response, though delivered in lockdowned flats and houses rather than on the long march from Murrayfield to the bars of Rose Street. It too featured a great try from the Welsh right-wing, in this case, the Penarth-born twenty-year-old Louis Rees-Zammit.
Physically speaking, he and Gerald Davies have little in common; Rees-Zammit stands at 6ft 3 and Gerald is perhaps 5ft 8. Indeed, the wing young Rees-Zammit calls to mind is Tony O’Reilly, the Ireland and Lions star of the 1950s. Nor was his Murrayfield try a last minute winner. The last minute almost belonged to Scotland, their left-wing Duhan van der Merwe being denied a score only by a beautifully timed tap-tackle from the Welsh centre Owen Watkin. The referee then declined, perhaps rightly, to penalise Wales at the ruck that followed. The match was not only great due to the players overcoming the strange circumstances to deliver a game of high quality and intensity on a bitterly cold February late afternoon, but it was also one of those in which partisanship went hand-in-hand with appreciation.
It is typical in any sporting encounter to find yourself backing one side. It’s rare to watch a tennis match without finding yourself favouring one player. Has anyone ever been neutral when Federer plays Nadal? Yet in a team sport, one can have heroes on the other side too. I would never have hoped Wales would beat Scotland, but I would always have been distressed to see Barry John or Shane Williams having a poor game, even against Scotland.
Neville Cardus once wrote that as a boy, he would pray, “Please, God, let Australia be all out for 150 with Victor Trumper a hundred not out.” Whether he ever uttered that prayer is irrelevant, it expresses a feeling that is common and proper. Your heroes and the players you most admire are never and should never be, all on your side. The players themselves may recognise this, even in the heat of battle. When, as a young wrist-spinner, Arthur Mailey deceived that same Victor Trumper and bowled him out, he said later, “it felt as if I had shot a dove”.
Though I have always hoped that England would win an Ashes series, as a boy I felt about some Australians (Arthur Morris, Keith Miller and, especially, Neil Harvey) as Mailey did about Trumper. And so it continues. Respect, admiration, even affection, for the opposition is a necessary part of the sport. One doesn’t, for instance, like to see players one has admired, struggling. I recall a match when the great full-back JPR Williams was brought back into the Welsh team from what was perhaps semi-retirement. He had a horror of a game, and it was painful to watch. Not everyone feels like this, of course. When Don Bradman was out for a second-ball duck in his last Test innings, two of his former team-mates – Bill O’Reilly and Jack Fingleton – are said to have laughed so much that they fell off their stools.
Partisanship should go only so far, it should always be tempered by a fuller appreciation of the game. I very much hope to see Scotland beat this fine young French team in Paris next week, but my delight will be that little bit less if one reason for our victory is that the marvellous Antoine Dupont has a shocker of a game.