The Ministry Of Truth

I apologise, in a time when so much of importance is going on in the news, to write about something so utterly superficial as what you are about to read (or at least you might get half way through it) but my excuse is that I am on holiday (and I’m sticking to it).

In the space of one week, two seperate sporting incidents of a highly trivial nature have created a rather revealing (and some might argue disproportionate) amount of column inches.

Mindful of the fact that I am really only adding to the same by commentating on the commentators, it pricked my interest because of what it might reveal about the ‘national psyche’, but ultimately only tells us (as if we needed telling) how naff our national sporting media is.

9 days ago in Rome, the Newcastle utility back Toby Flood scored a try in the right corner in a 6 Nations test match between England and Italy which England went on narrowly to win.

2 days ago in Manchester the Portuguese winger Nani dribbled the ball back towards his goal and then turned and sought to clear it, in an FA Cup 5th round match between Manchester United and Arsenal which ended in a convincing victory for the home side (much though it pains me to say it).

What the two incidents had in common was that they both contained something which appears to cause a number of sporting aficionados and commentators a certain amount of distress - a flourish. Put another way, it was something elaborate, visual, skilful, amusing, original and, admittedly, almost entirely unnecessary. Both incidents qualified as what the French call ‘panache’ but what your third form cricket master might equally call ‘mucking about’.

For those that ‘didn’t see the incidents’, here they have been captured for posterity by some frivolous subversives who have no respect for sport or people’s fragile sensibilities:

( Flood try is at 4:31)

I’m not sure what is more bewildering, the fact that people object to random moments of individuality on the sports field, or the hypocrisy (perhaps in this lightweight context ‘double standards’ is more appropriate) with which these objections are made.

Players have ‘dived’ to score tries since Rugby first began - it is a form of premature celebration designed to stimulate one’s supporters and occasionally to make a point (in Flood’s case: “England are back, and we can score tries”) . The video linked to above also contains two Vincent Clerc dives and a James Hook dive, all perpetrated on the same weekend in the same tournament, but they all had the comparative merit of….well, not being as good, so escaped censure. Yet Flood’s club coach John Fletcher called the dive “unnecessary” in his programme notes for the next Newcastle club match against Saracens (a game Newcastle won thanks to another Flood try). The perplexing root of people’s objections to the ‘Flood-dive’ varies between “he could have injured himself” (get a life);”England only won by a handful of points, so he shouldn’t have been so cocky” (hindsight - England were cruising at the time he scored); “Rugby is a gentleman’s game and we can’t have silliness” (get a death), and “he should respect the opposition” (of which more later).

As for Nani, it wasn’t so long ago in the World Cup 2006 that Zinedine Zidane’s performance against Brazil in the quarter final was being cooed over by the BBC, despite containing a veritable encyclopaedia of almost wholly unnecessary footballing tricks. Similarly when England were thrashing Germany 5-1 in Munich in 2003, Steven Gerrard’s three-card humiliation of Liverpool clubmate Dietmar Hamann didn’t seem to cause anyone much of a problem. The great entertainers (Maradona, Gascoigne, Best, Zidane…er, Gerrard?) all enjoyed a flourish and were popular not just because they won matches, but because they did so with style. Maybe Nani isn’t a great player yet, but don’t people buy tickets to be entertained? And if we argue that he should confine his entertainment to the business of winning, aren’t we taking it all a bit too seriously? The objections to Nani all seem to emanate from an unwritten rule in football that ‘you don’t take the piss out of the opposition’ when you’ve beaten them. Why not? If you thrash a team out of sight, particularly a rival (the effect might have been somewhat less palatable if Man Utd had been 4-0 up against Havant and Waterlooville, I’ll grant you) what on earth is wrong with a bit of a dig, in a sporting context, to entertain the fans? I don’t suppose the Arsenal players were all thinking “never mind getting tonked out of the Cup 4-0, that juggling was really beyond the pale”. And I’m sure one of them would have done the same if the roles were reversed, and fair play. He’s letting his football skill do the talking, which is all we ever ask.

Are we such a humourless, straight-laced nation that voices rise to declaim panache in sport? No of course we’re not - we love it and we want more, please. Sure, don’t let it be more important than the game itself, or you’ll probably get dropped and forgotten about forever. But if you’re in the business of winning, please don’t be frightened of winning with style - it’s far better than gloating in words after the game: you can leave that to the fans.