(huffingtonpress.com)
On Tuesday morning the English football team returned from the FIFA World Cup in South Africa. Disillusioned, exhausted and dejected, they came face to face with a barrage of headlines about their failures and disasters, not least one that said "The Flops Come Home". Today, the men are still followed on their deserved holiday with stories screeching how The Flops are taking holidays while the fans are still unhappy. While the players rightly get on with their lives, acknowledging that they played a match and it's over, and it's time to look towards the next one, some sections of the British media are still bashing them, still bleating and whimpering, taking football out of all proportion to its role in our lives.
The British media is responsible for a lot that has happened in South Africa and continues to happen in our sports. They love to raise players to the heights of demi-gods when it suits their purposes, and especially when those players are performing well, then waste little time in knocking them back down to the ground with vitriolic content, all in the drive to sell papers. They love to hype the team up before a match, burdening them with unrealistic expectations, then vilifying them after any bad performance - from one extreme to the other. That is very bad psychologically and emotionally for the players.
Playing any kind of game is an ongoing activity, a continual 'war' with many battles. In the bid to develop the best team, some battles will be lost, just as many will be won. World Cup football is not a one-off performance where the players won't be doing anything after that. There are tons more competitions to come. It means that no matter what the team is participating in, the media need to bear that crucial fact in mind. When they run players down after every match, how does that affect them? How does that restore their confidence, build their morale and instill a winners' mindset to do even better next time? After all, if one keeps constantly whacking a goose that lays golden eggs because the goose is not laying them quickly enough, soon there will be a dead goose and no eggs at all!
The country those players represent is also their 'family'. When our family, the closest to us, rejects us too, what then? Whom do we have on our side? To whom can we turn? Would we really wish to represent that family again? If our team loses abroad, especially on the world stage, no one can underestimate just how much loss of pride, prestige and reputation they immediately suffer. To then have their own country rejecting them too in that vitriolic way is not a winning formula for the future. It will simply lead to more of the same. There is a fundamental reason for that.
(Before the World Cup, the Sun touts England's perceived 'easy' time with the draw they have had.)
The Results of Negative Attacks
When we knock players every time they lose, instead of acknowledging what they have achieved up to that point, we instill shame and fear inside of them: fear of taking risks, fear of the consequences of their actions and fear of failure. Yet failure and success are two sides of the same coin. People fail only when the fear of failure has taken them over and they have lost faith in their ability to win. The more they are bashed for those failures is the less self-belief they have, the more difficult it is for them to believe they have the talent to win and the worse they perform when it matters. Fear destroys, it doesn't build. Yet the players need failures to learn. They need to take risks and they need mistakes to improve their art. In fact, I would hazard a guess that the trouncing by Germany will probably do far more to hone the team's skills and potential than anything else they have encountered. That's why Fabio Capello was absolutely right when he stressed business as usual and started looking forward to the future.
Participating in the FIFA World Cup is not an automatic right. It is a hard fought competitive event which is getting more difficult each year as more and more countries vie for the prestige and media glory of being involved in it. For the record, since 1950 when England began to enter the World Cup, the team has participated in 13 of the 16 possible events, winning one of them and reaching the quarter-finals in another six. That means they have done extremely well 81% of the time. That doesn't sound like losers to me! Only three occasions did they not qualify.
More important, England has a competition all time rank of being No. 5 of the 76 countries which have qualified for the World Cup down the years. That means only Brazil, Germany, Italy and Argentina rank above them. They are also No. 8 in the whole world, of all the 202 countries who play the sport. Those high rankings do not suggest 'flops', 'awful' 'rubbish' players. They suggest a team that has continuously delivered high standards of football, albeit erratically, and have always performed at a level only dreamed of by most of their opponents. English football is the envy of the world, especially the Premier League which attracts foreign managers like bees to honey.
Time to stop insulting our boys and encourage them instead. To accept that we are nurturing a winning team, not just a team to win one-off matches; accept that defeat and success have to be taken in stride in order for the team to be ready psychologically to fight another day, get over it and move on. Our life is dictated by our thought processes. When we dwell on failure, instead of moving briskly on, that is all we get - more failure. We cannot get glory and achievement out of negative thoughts and actions. We have to think like winners, act like winners and be treated like winners.
Germany's Thomas Mueller, who scored two goals against England, made the best comment so far. He said England needed younger hungrier players "prepared to make sacrifices". The team had "too many chiefs and not enough indians". That is a very important point the team managers need to consider. But when the team loses, the press should acknowledge it, and perhaps feel sad for it. But, above all, remind the team where they are coming from and where they still could reach, and get behind their efforts. That is the true role of a sensible media. Otherwise the labels the media are currently so willing to pin on to the players could all become horrible self fulfilling prophecies!
No comments:
Post a Comment