David Penberthy: Hey sports fans, you’re adults. So act like it
THE most embarrassing aspect of what happened at the game on Saturday is that it had at its starting point a juvenile inability to manage a sporting defeat, writes David Penberthy.
AFTER last year’s banana-fuelled Showdown nonsense, I wrote a column saying that what should be a uniquely thrilling, hard-fought sporting spectacle was often marred by a handful of dingbats who are mentally ill-equipped to deal with the loss of their team.
Forget Robbo’s nonsense — SA in no way has a monopoly on this sort of behaviour. But there is nothing like a Showdown to bring out the very worst in a very small, and very annoying percentage of the crowd.
The events of the past few days have only cemented that conviction. It is such a shame that what was an extraordinary game of football has been subsumed by another round of rubbish. All because the tiniest handful of people are bent out of shape by this seemingly uncontrollable local hatred.
Indeed, in the event that Port and the Crows should ever make a Grand Final, we might need to ring the United Nations to see if we can borrow the same group of psychologists and social workers who helped reunite the Rwanda after the violence between the Hutus and the Tutsis.
I suppose the only saving grace would be that whatever mayhem followed would transpire on the streets of Melbourne, rather than in Adelaide.
Within hours of last Saturday’s match, social media was the venue for the usual claims and counterclaims being levelled against supporters of the respective teams. Not for the first time, there was evidence of drunken violence, and racist abuse levelled against players on both sides.
Enough has been said about the specific issue of racism. I have no intention of exploring that theme here, mainly for the sake of those players who were on the receiving end of it, and for the sake of their teammates who share the same skin colour. All I will say for those blokes is how dispiriting it must be to devote your life to a pursuit which brings people nothing but entertainment and exhilaration, only to be treated in such a despicable fashion.
The most embarrassing aspect of what happened on Saturday is that, again, it had at its starting point a juvenile inability to manage a sporting defeat. Human beings are meant to mature with their passing years. The manner in which these so-called adults conducted themselves on Saturday was no different from a seven-year-old throwing the Monopoly set across the room. It is conduct of the most childish kind, with the violence and racism becoming the vehicle by which this puerile form of frustration manifests itself.
There is a fantastic English writer called Theodore Dalrymple who divides his time between working as a general practitioner in the British prison system and housing projects, and writing articles about the day-to-day lives of the underclass. He is a noble crusader for the besieged and seemingly old-fashioned concept of personal responsibility.
One of his best essays is entitled The Knife Went In, where he documents what he calls “the exculpatory language of the criminal underclass”, which is a highbrow way of defining the weasel words that criminals use to describe their actions.
It is always a case of “the gun went off”, “the knife went in”, “the alcohol made me react”; never “I shot him”, “I stabbed him”, “I got drunk and assaulted him”. The role of personal choice is erased; the perpetrators become innocents whose actions are determined by uncontrollable, external forces.
This mindset also exists with sport, whereby the feeble of mind, be they rich or poor, educated or uneducated, will find themselves “set off” by the fact that the final score didn’t fall their way.
I was thinking about this Dalrymple essay while watching the Seven Network’s purported “exclusive” with that troubled couple who were behind the post-Showdown Facebook post that is now the subject of police attention.
It struck me as kind of laughable that Seven billed this as some crackerjack journalistic scoop. If it were, it’s a scoop in much the same way that Sam Newman’s now-junked Street Talk segment was a scoop, given that the pair in question in Seven’s report appear to be grappling with significant challenges.
There was one line from that news report which resonated strongly, where the male partner of the woman defended what she had written on Facebook in the aftermath of the match.
“It’s not her fault that she don’t like these players,” he said, his arm around his partner, explaining that her behaviour having been “set off” by a poor result on the sporting field.
As I alluded to before, you could fairly suspect there might be some educational issues, that will ultimately better explain the conduct of these two people. You would almost hope that there are for their sake.
But whatever other issues are at play in this case, the mindset demonstrated by this bloke in rationalising his partner’s conduct is something that is shared by anyone who is incapable of dealing with sporting loss.
When the former Liverpool manager Bill Shankly said football wasn’t a matter of life or death, but much more important than that, I am pretty sure he had his tongue in his cheek. But for those sports fans who are incapable of processing a loss, and act like halfwits in the aftermath, the Shankly maxim isn’t an amusing one-liner but a credo to live by.
This is the starting point of everything that happened afterwards on Saturday. These people exist in small numbers, but large enough to spoil it for everyone else, where sport is such a matter of life or death that it makes you wonder what sort of lives they have at all.