I’m not being facetious when I tell you I failed a test of my character recently. As I’m of Anglosaxon descent I don’t expect Borderforce to try to deport me so I’m happy to share the story here. It happened playing sport. After a few years of supposed retirement I’ve returned to playing soccer this year. I’m actually loving being back into it. Much as I enjoy the challenge of pushing myself physically and mentally through running and triathlon, team sport provides a different outlet. I don’t usually give myself a hard time about losing games or making mistakes, but I was reflecting on a recent game and I realised that although on many levels I had played a good game, at another level I was pretty disappointed in myself. I’ll elaborate. It was game that we won comfortably. I felt I had done my job pretty well and even scored a goal, which is rare for me. But where I failed was something that I thought of as a whole lot more important than the result of a social game of sport. Not that many people in my league act like they are playing a social game of sport. Several of my teammates were involved in ongoing verbal spats with some of our opponents. This is hardly unusual. There is what I would describe as an outdated notion in sport that what happens on the field stays on the field and that players who are affected by “White Line Fever,” shouldn’t be judged by that after the game.
I wrote a few years ago just how false I think this argument is, but I seem to be in a minority within the soccer community at least. So as the game wore, on the sledging and dirty tackles got worse on both sides. Fair enough, I suppose. It’s a contact sport and there were a few players on the other team I had little respect for myself. I just prefer to respond by working harder than with empty words or cheap shots. Unsurprisingly, as the score blew out into a thrashing in our favour, our opponents got quieter, but some of my teammates wouldn’t leave it and continued to belittle them. To a lot of people this might seem to be just part the game- and I don’t claim my perspective is more valid or enlightened than my teammates- but to me there was something unedifying and slightly embarrassing about it. And that is the key point here. A former Australian of the Year famously said, “The standard you walk past is the standard you set,” and I didn’t intervene when I saw something that I thought was wrong. I really enjoy playing as part of this team. They are a hilarious bunch of guys and the behaviour I describe is no failing of theirs, as they presumably felt their actions were warranted (as I said, it’s not unusual in competitive sport and there was little love lost between the teams) within the context of competitive sport. But it was a failure of mine that I didn’t say anything because I didn’t think it was right. By tacitly accepting the behaviour, I became complicit in it and on reflection I wish I wasn’t. Why didn’t I intervene? Was I worried about upsetting or provoking a teammate? Maybe. I find it difficult to predict how others will react to my words or actions at the best of time. I would like to think I wouldn’t let a fear of what someone might say to me hold me from acting, but perhaps in the moment I thought my intervention would just add fuel to a fire which would burn out of its own accord if left alone. This might well have been true, but on reflection it still felt like I should have done more. Sometimes it is hard to focus on a fast-paced game and on a bigger question at the same time and I’ve no doubt this played some part. More than anything, I suspect I didn’t pay it enough attention at the time to realise the significance the behaviour had to me. I usually (over)think a lot about how I interact with others- having made some poor choices when I was younger. In this instance, without time to reflect, I failed to act when it was needed. So what do I do about it? I hope I do better in the future. And that is the best thing about acknowledging a failure. I can do better in the future. We actually had no game the following week and we don’t train; so it was a full fortnight before I saw most of my teammates and it felt like the moment for any comment on our previous game had passed. But that didn’t mean I didn’t have a job to do. I didn’t need to get sanctimonious and try to tell people I thought they had done wrong, but I have been deliberate about working harder to providing encouragement and positive feedback for behaviours that I do value. And while it hasn’t been required yet, I am confident I will do better at calling out unacceptable behaviour next time.
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