Here at TFT we’re always keen to give people a voice, and we welcome contributions of all kinds from our readers and commenters. We’re grateful to Owen Benton for this thought-provoking piece.
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Can you support a team without liking them?
I grew up in what I now I think of as the ‘Star Wars’ era of cricket. Australia were the evil empire: dominant, unbeatable bullies. Shane Warne was the emperor, not just beating but mocking those foolish enough to challenge him.
England were the rebel alliance.Small. Unimpressive. Always about to be crushed by a superior force. Except, unlike in the film, the rebels did get crushed. Every time.
To my morose young self, it stood as a symbol of everything that was unfair and cruel about the world. Until 2005, when Vaughan, Freddie, KP, Tresco and the rest did what throughout my life I had assumed to be impossible. They blew up the Death Star. The good guys won.
At the time, it felt like something bigger had happened than simply a cricket team winning a series. O for the days of my youth.
By this time, you’re probably telling me to grow up. Or you certainly should be. Don’t worry, I have now (mostly). As I did, my perspective on sport changed. I realised that there was no meaningful, absolute sense, in which my team were ‘the good guys and the opposition were ‘the ‘bad guys’.
More particularly, I realised that all the things which I had taken as incontrovertible proof of Australia’s moral scummery – refusing to walk, sledging and the like, were practised just as liberally by England. A succession of stories came out revealing some of England’s players to be, at various times, childish, petulant and abusive.
But I still enjoyed cricket. I still wanted to support England. So I came to a decision:
“These people are not my friends. I will likely never meet them socially. I’m never going to have a drink with them,
“So whether I like them as people is totally irrelevant. All that matters from now on, is how they play cricket.”
I could support the team, and let all the guff about whether or not they were “good blokes’’ wash over me. Maybe they were, maybe they weren’t. I couldn’t really know and I didn’t really care.
This attitude served me pretty well for a few years. Particularly so, since I also follow that other sport which should not be named.
In that sport, I support Liverpool.
The “it’s not my problem what they’re like as people’’ thing allowed me to enjoy Luis Suarez cutting opposing defences to ribbons with out having to think too much about the frightening scale of his personality issues. But I’m starting to wonder: Is my attitude pragmatic or just plain old hypocrisy?
The more I learn about the inner workings of the England team, the less I like it. I’m starting to long for the days when I knew practically nothing beyond what I saw on the field.
I have no idea whether KP’s allegations about Matt Prior are true, although they do make sense of quite a few things. If they are, then I’m not sure I could ever get behind England if Prior was recalled. His every success would leave a sour taste.
If the allegations are untrue then it puts Pietersen, a player I’ve admired through his entire career, in an even worse light. Assassinating someone’s reputation while they’re out of the side with a serious injury.
I’m honestly not sure which I would prefer.
For a few years now, I’ve ignored the question of whether I actually like the England team. The answer is rather uncomfortable.
Owen Benton
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If you’re interested in contributing a post to The Full Toss, please e-mail maxie@thefulltoss.com
Well said indeed! Below’s another piece on not supporting England:
http://giffenman-miscellania.blogspot.co.uk/2014/09/should-nanny-states-enforcers-tell.html
Thanks for this, Girish, some excellent points here.
Trouble is whenI feel I don’t like the team Iam not rooting for them to win. I found myself cheering in Ondia and Sri Lanka this summer which left me feeling rather uncomfortable.
I feel so alienated from cricket due to the ECB calling me and everyone else “outsiders!” All the lying, deceiving, bullying, and manoeuvring, and calculating mischief, has left me jaundiced. Until the ECB goes I am not sure I will ever feel the same again. I loved cricket but I cannot bring myself to watch. When Cook starts speaking I just turn off the sound. KP won’t play for England again and that’s for sure. But the nastiness of this whole terrible saga will take a long time before it ceases to be the after-taste of a very bad lunch.
Thanks Maxie and James and all for letting us all air our feelings good and bad even if some of us get out of hand – like moi!
Cheers. Annie
I don’t think I can support them whilst not liking them. I want the new players to do well as they have not been part of the toxic set up. I want to see the brilliant, fearless batting which I did with KP. I fear we are going to see same old grinding it out like we do with cook.
I will do my best but my heart will never be in it the same way as it used to and I suspect it will be the same for many. When you inspire that level of disinterest I fear there will be many who will give up watching whether at the grounds or on sky.
That is the saddest thing of all.
Disinterest? I’ll put Paul Downton on to you…
Maxie can I claim I was being facetious? If not! it was definitely the chemo. Honest Sir.
Yes you can!
“My heart will never be in it the same way as it used to and I suspect it will be the same for many”.
It will. The landscape has been changed beyond recognition. It’s very hard to put all this behind us and just try to carry on as normal.
There is a great line in one of the Inspector Morse episodes when Morse is becoming more and more disillusioned about an opera singer he is investigating. Lewis says to him………” My dad liked football, but he hated footballers.”
I think it was Bruce Springsteen who wrote a Song about professional sport. He points out the players play in red or blue, the fans wear red or blue, and sit at either end of the ground. It is only the owners of the teams who sit in the same box.
The real divide is between owners and fans.
Gwladys Probert, Twighlight of the Gods, with Robert Hardy as the Maxwell-like ex Nazi.
Yes, and it was one of my favourite episodes – where a disillusioned Morse thoroughly concurs with what Lewis’ Dad thought – how unlike the days of Botham, Gower, Willis, Vaughan, Flintoff, Randall etc.
“The real divide is between owners and fans”.
You don’t say….
The players themselves have done a lot in the last few years to alienate fans. Remember the match against New Zealand at Headingley that England won just in time although they should have won easily – and Trott coming out with the line that they don’t look at weather forecasts when deciding what to do. This plays into the notion that the English team is/was a bunch of extremely stupid people who would not dare to stand up to an everwheening coach such as Flower. Trott’s painfully slow batting was one reason why England so nearly ran out of time in this match.
Do you remember the extreme timidity which England displayed when Australia posted big first innings totals at Old Trafford and the Oval? If that was the cricket of a superior team, as the media and many commentators were saying at the time (I believe that includes TFT and Dmitri, by the way!), then I felt it was a two-fingered salute being delivered to the crowd by a team playing without passion and drive. In retrospect, it shows that the batsmen were beginning to be dominated by Harris, Siddle and Lyon, a domination that would be consummated with the return of Mitchell Johnson.
There was the “edgy” on field activity of Broady, Jimmy and Swanny…all designed to annoy fans as much as the opposition and the umpires. Has any team in history played with so little joy and charisma. The Windies hasd the smiles of Greenidge and Richardson as they destroyed bowlers. Ambrose might have scowled all the time, but Walsh and Marshall seemed happy in their work. Warne always looked happy even if Hayden was always scowling – but then the latter was probably still trying to remember a piece of meaningless management-speak that he had heard for the first time at breakfast that day. Without KP, that England team had very little personality. I exclude Swann because he always struck me as about as amusing as Mr Blobby and his onfield screaming was just offensive.
And that is without going into the crazy, intelligence-defying decisions of the selectors over the last few years.
They keep on about getting to be number 1 in the world, but it didn’t last very long. No sooner had they got there, they lost the top spot.
Maxie used a good phase the other day regards the role of the coach…..”mission creep”. It seems to have multiplied into a football coach role with total control of all aspects. There was the moment in New Zealand when England were setting a target do declare. Cook, who was batting seemed to be taking orders from the coach as to when to declare. He denied it. But it did appear that the coach was setting the target.
Duncan Fletcher seemed to be more hands off. He also was a good judge of a player. He brought Marcus Tres. into the team because he saw something in him. His stats were not that great but he was selected on gut instinct. KP was the same. Vaughn said under Fletcher that the captain was in charge during a match. Not sure that is true now.
Well, if Cook can barely talk in a team meeting there’s no way he can be in charge when the game is actually going on. When it’s over, he goes home and asks Alice what to do the next day anyway.
I agree with your overall point but, just on the specific of the Oval, I think the way they batted was actually very sensible, almost perfect (this may have just been an accident, of course, and not thought through at all).
Once Australia had posted that big first innings score it was their game to lose. Time was expected to be lost to light and weather and there wasn’t really enough time in the game for England to post a big score and win, regardless of how unlikely that was anyway. If they batted sensibly there wasn’t really enough time for them to lose, either, and they were already 3-0 up, and Australia was desperate.
Australia’s best prospect of winning with the time available was if England went out hard and collapsed (as Australia had done repeatedly) By grinding out a whole day for the loss of just four wickets they effectively put Australia out of the game. Their frustration was revealed by Faulkner’s comments after the day’s play.
Good points…but if it was true that weather forecasts made no difference to their tactical decisions then the slow batting was not influenced by that! I think they just got obsessed with the idea of not losing their wickets during the course of that year, to the extent that they forgot to score runs. Look at the number of times that Carberry in Australia and Root in both Australia and England got totally becalmed. It is a tactical approach that will fail more often than not, becauuse a flurry of wickets means you are 30/5 instead of 200/5.
Overall I’m slightly wary of suggesting that it’s the rank and file players themselves who are culpable for the gaping chasm between the supporters and the Team England monolith. Most of the individual players have done little if anything wrong and are just trying to play their cricket and keep their places.
The blame attaches to those above.
Earlier this year quite a few people suggested that the aloofness and detachment of the players was a key factor in all this. Lo and behold – at, I think, the Headingley test, Joe Root and a couple of others were dispatched to the outfield during an interval for a very stagey and ostentatious autograph signing session. It was so obviously a contrived gesture, a box-ticking exercise, insincerely devised by someone in management just to counter those headlines.
Hi, new to this forum, but good to read that what has been eating away at me since February is shared by others. I made the decision to ‘boycott’ watching England since the ECB decided to dispense with KP’s services. What I have seen and heard since then has pushed me further away from wanting to go back, not just on principle but also the style of cricket being dished up.
Hi Phil – thanks for visiting us and contributing.
You’re not alone. I’ve not witnessed this level of disillusionment in thirty years of watching England. And the sad things is that we don’t want this, and we don’t revel in it – we want things to be better than this.
As examples, I didn’t like the great Australian side but I respected them for their talent and toughness, whether they won or lost (Ponting was the model of stoicism in defeat); I like the current Sri Lankan side and I respect them too.
I neither like nor respect the current England team as a whole, though it would be pleasant to see the younger ones to do well, and I actively dislike and disrespect the management. Such is the proprietary and exclusive attitude of the present ECB that I feel more and more that this has really become an ECB XI and I owe nothing to a privatised cash-cow of a team even if it wears England kit.
The only time recently that there was a glimpse of how things could be was the T20 against India, when suddenly a bright, active young England side were giving it their best shot, ably led, playing with enjoyment and skill. I liked them.
It doesn’t help that the ECB mercilessly hawk the players out as human advertising boards. Very little is beneath their dignity, however stilted and awkward a prospect is in store:
“Can you support a team without liking them?”
I managed to do that with the Australian Cricket Team for years.
I didn’t like the sledging. I didn’t like how Warne came across as a womaniser. And there were several players who I am sure I couldn’t have tolerated in a social setting. Though Glenn McGrath has always managed to come across as everybody’s friend (that’s just my perspective, I don’t know the man beyond his television and radio appearances).
I still supported them. It helped that for much of my youth I was supporting a team that practically owned international cricket. But even when the gloss came off post 2007, I still managed to keep up my support.
I guess it is because I’ve never felt like the team and its management have been treating me with contempt. Which looks to me (as a total outsider to English cricket) to be the biggest problem the ECB has right now. The players might have been a bunch of obnoxious losers, but they didn’t treat their supporters badly.
I think it was around that infamous India series when even the Australian public became sick of the Aussie team. The aggression, the rank hypocrisy, the disrespectful attitude towards oppositions. Didn’t last that long though.
Australia does a pretty good job of keeping the team connected to the fans. The most significant thing is surely that they keep Australian cricket on free-to-air TV. It’s hard to underestimate the damage taking cricket away from FTA TV has done to the game in Britain.
Another thing they do (although this is becoming increasingly a facade) is break down the divide between the professional and amateur games. Professionals and even Test players all have a grade side they belong to and still turn out for once or twice a year. Nathan Lyon, Brad Haddin, and a couple of NSW players still turn out for my local team. And it goes the other way, too: first grade players are always looking at selection for state teams, and they do get picked. Once people are pros in England they tend to remain pros, and never the twain shall meet.
That said, administration-wise, cricket’s been in a sorry state in Aus the last few years. Things seem to have turned around in the last year. I suppose the truth of it is, winning solves a lot of problems..or at least knocks them in to the long grass for another day.
That Indian tour was a watershed. Punter definitely seem to change afterwards. He would still blow his top occasionally, but it would soon blow over. There seemed to be fewer attempts to bully the umpires. Plus I always liked Ponting because of his total honesty in post-match interviews. No bullshit, no rehearsed cliches like many of the England players. He told it like it is, often with a bit of humour, and dare I say it, even grace in his later years. In 2009, he went from being booed at Lord’s to being cheered by the time of the Oval. Perhaps I could be cruel and say that losing made him a better person!
One of the things that most struck me in the KP book was how tired he became of all the on-pitch nastiness — being expected to snarl and grunt and sledge all the time. Especially as he’d made friends with some of the opposition via the IPL and had known some of the South Africans since his teens. He found it not only puerile but counterproductive, because he feels he performs better when he’s happy (obviously Headingley 2012 was an exception!). Other members of the team didn’t have those cross-cultural friendships and thought he was being too friendly with the enemy.
Which shows how far things have come, because flash back a few years and having a beer in the opposition dressing room was quite normal. Now there was Strauss at Headingley pulling KP away from his Saffer friends, which led to them them calling Strauss a doos in a private BBM…
It seems ridiculous: If we’re going to have teams that include players from different backgrounds, we shouldn’t expect them to deny those backgrounds. Will Chris Jordan be eyed with suspicion next year if he doesn’t get stuck into the West Indians verbally? Utterly childish.
KP reckoned that playing against a friend made him more determined to win, not less. Jimmy obviously feels he has to make enemies and get nasty. But the latter approach risks gettjng out of hand, especially if that nastiness starts being directed at team mates as well. And if you’re still swearing at a member of the opposition as you come off the field, then incidents like whatever happened with Jadeja can occur.
On the subject of liking England players, it seems to me that they are very difficult to like when they’re not enjoying their jobs. All the fun seems to have been sucked out of the English game. They play a ridiculous amount of international cricket (the extreme was 2011-12 — after three gruelling months in Australia, some players had to leave for the world cup four days after returning home); Jimmy bowls an eyewatering number of overs. No wonder he’s grumpy. No wonder they fall out in the dressing room. In fact, it’s a wonder they haven’t killed one another by now.
However, new blood can make a difference. When Jos Buttler came into the side, he seemed to spread his relaxed, cheerful disposition to the rest of the team and — lo and behold, they started performing better, and being more likeable at the same time. (With the exception of the captain who continued to carry his own giant cross around with him.)
Isn’t Allan Border credited, in 1989, with the culture change of non-fraternisation with the oppo?
The increased sense tribalism – which perhaps has an ethnic undertone – is unhealthy and sours international cricket. Ultimately, cricket is only a game, and played for everyone’s enjoyment. Cricket is all one big, global, club, and that’s the joy of it.
The heightened wariness of the opposition has led, England, particularly, into unpleasant and self-damaging corners. Remember the fuss around Michael Vaughan’s allegations that Jonathan Trott visited the victorious South African dressing room in 2008? Trott denied it, but does it really matter?
Strauss and Flower appeared to turn the whole notion of Team England into almost a religious cult. Hence their ludicrously disproportionate response to the BBM messages. What the hell difference did they make?
It’s a great pity to see the alienation of fans by a team.
In the spirit of good neighbourliness and prompted by the joy and pleasure I have taken in the company of pretty much everyone on here and many from the Guardian BTL community;
I’d like to invite you all to become honorary Australians and support a side that on the whole seems currently to be pretty likable. There is of course the added bonus that they are playing pretty good and mostly winning cricket lately.
The captain after some early wobbles is first class and is as tough as old boot leather. We have a coach who seems pretty affable and effective with seemingly no touch of the ‘Ministry’ about him.
There’s also Steve Smith, what’s not to like? Some pretty good bowlers who despite the ability to instill fear in opposition batsman again seem like pretty pleasant people outside of work.
David Warner seems to be mending his ways and promises some brilliant innings in the future. And lets face it Root is as unpleasant as Warner has been painted and wasn’t actually hit or at least not hard enough top wipe the smirk off his face.
Ok the board is as repulsive as the English board but you always need a Frank Burns type of character to polarise issues.
To sum up;
Welcome to the Darkside’.
Have a feeling I am half way there…..
Well you’d be very welcome :-)
“The joy and pleasure I have taken in the company of pretty much everyone on here”.
I’m very glad you feel that way, Ian.
o
“I’d like to invite you all to become honorary Australians and support a side that on the whole seems currently to be pretty likable”.
We English envy you Lehmann. He is exactly the kind of figure we’d give our right arms for right now. Clarke – he’s always got on my nerves in a slightly undefinable way. Root as unpleasant as Warner? Really? Who punched who? All Root did was wear a comedy wig, as I outlined here:
https://www.thefulltoss.com/england-cricket-blog/wig-gate-the-unanswered-questions/
“There’s also Steve Smith, what’s not to like?”
It’s good to see that in spite of everything you retain your sense of humour, Ian.
No I can’t support a team I don’t like. I love cricket, always have, and I watch because I want to see cricketers doing remarkable things. So I have been privileged to see Sir Viv score a ton in a morning at Hove, applauded a superb McGrath bowling spell at the Oval, enjoyed KP taking on the great Aussie bowling attack and, with thousands of others, roared on Botham tearing into the West indies at the Oval again.
And in fairness most England supporters show their appreciation and recognition to fine opponents. The huge ovations given to Walsh and Ambrose at the Oval in 2000 were probably the most touching moments I can remember at a test match.
I’ve just commented in a reply to Maxie that I’d missed on a previous article and said pretty much exactly the same thing. I was actually cheering for Sri Lanka and kind of hoped India would win over the Summer.
And for that, Badger, many would call you a traitor who has no right to call themselves an England supporter. But they would completely miss the point: why should you continue to give your all to a team who, from your perspective, don’t give two hoots about you?
Hi guys, I was planning to go and watch the England Shower this coming summer in Cardiff when the Ashes coming round – and I have never been to a Test Match in my 35 Years of devotion to the Summer Game – Being in Pembrokeshire and money and time at a premium and the cheapest tickets coming in at £65 a pop (hear that Graeme Swann – not £20!!!!!!!!!), but reading drivel and maliciousness like this link below makes me feel that there would be more worthwhile causes for my dosh!
http://www.independent.co.uk/sport/general/athletics/view-from-the-sofa-the-loneliness-of-the-longdistance-runner-could-teach-kevin-pietersen-a-lot-9790056.html
I felt after reading this to buy KP’s tome and tell the writer of this drivel, that reading this article by him made me by it – and imagine his reaction!
There’s no use trying to get a point across to anyone who so blatantly distorts the context. Pietersen is complaining of the injustice and malpractice of Team England. Clearly he was not suggesting he deserves the kind of sympathy due to someone with a life-affecting illness.
By Matt Butler’s logic, no sportsperson could ever complain about anything.
On the tickets front, we’ll address this issue properly in a few weeks’ time.