Legend Shankly gets my vote every time

Dear Springbok fans

Come on, guys, what were so many of you thinking with your praise of the side after their one-point defeat by the All Blacks on Saturday? I am the first to admit it was a vast improvement from the 57-0 drubbing dished out by the Kiwis in Albany earlier in the Rugby Championbship, but it was a loss.

The bounce of the ball didn’t always go our way and there were a couple of dodgy calls from the referee (I can’t remember when last I watched a Test where this DIDN’T happen), but some of the gushing praise dished out to the Boks was, in my view, unmerited.

Sure, All Black coach Steve Hansen included all his big names, but they travelled halfway around the world and must have been a bit leaden-footed. In saying that, I don’t think those guys ever suffer from jet lag. Their performances don’t suggest so.

But we were the home team. Social media was full of posts praising the Boks for a gutsy performance. In fact, I read about half a dozen posts back-to-back that, if I hadn’t known better, sounded like we had won the game.

I was at a mate’s 50th birthday party and only caught the last 15odd

Guy Hawthorne

minutes because my daughter did that techno-savvy thing with her cellphone and streamed it. I caught the replay later and, again, while I was quite impressed with what I saw, we still lost.

It was early 20th Century American sportswriter Grantland Rice who wrote: “It’s not whether you win or lose but how you play the game”. Now I don’t know much about Mr Rice, but this sounds like a defeatist attitude, one voiced by someone who was probably not very sporty. Definitely no relation to the late Clive Rice, who DEMANDED victory from every cricket team he captained.

I prefer the opinion of the late Bill Shankly. The former Liverpool manager once famously said: “Some people think football is a matter of life and death. I assure you, it’s much more serious than that.”

I am a very bad loser and when I watch a team I support in action, I want them to win. They can play well, but if the scoreboard isn’t in their favour come the final whistle, I am miserable. And, if I am miserable, I make those around me miserable and my better half and I end up arguing over something trivial and I end up sleeping on the couch. So now you understand why victory is so important to me.

I wondered about being the sole selector of a national sports team. If I was presented with a provisional list from which to pick my starting line-up and that list included the names Grantland Rice and Bill Shankly, one guess who would get the nod?

For me, that choice would be a no-brainer.