Winning Isn’t Everything. Or Is It?

Winning isn’t everything. Apparently. We’re now living in a new age of international sport where manners, decency and fair play are the objectives. The goal is to win respect not matches. Anyone would’ve thought that we’ve become Australia post sandpaper-gate.

I didn’t think so at the time, but maybe the entertainer at my 4th birthday party was right after all? It’s not whether you win or lose; it’s how you play the game that matters.

Now why am I going off on this seemingly irrelevant tangent you might ask? Don’t worry. I haven’t delved into the gin cupboard yet. It might be a Friday but my wife keeps it locked up until approximately 6pm (even at weekends). The reason I bring this is up is because Ashley Giles’s new goal for English cricket is to create ‘the most respected team in the world’. That’s right folks. We want to win hearts and minds in order to inspire the next generation of talented youngsters.

The ECB formally introduced their new head coach yesterday. Apparently it was a low-key affair, in a smallish room tucked away in the bowels of Lord’s somewhere, and Chris Silverwood was asked all the obvious questions about his new job.

He performed quite well by all accounts, but there must have been some disappointment that he didn’t repeat the barnstorming presentation that won him the job in the first place. His incredible PowerPoint skills, for the time being at least, will have to remain a mysterious thing of legend.

At first nothing particularly interesting came out of the presser. Silverwood seems like a nice guy, he spoke quite well, said nothing contentious, and made all the right noises. Job done.

However, a couple of things did catch my attention. The first was something so cheesy that I couldn’t let it go without taking the piss. And the second returns to the crux of this article: Ashley Giles’s grand plan to make the England team whiter than white. Bad luck Alex, Joe, and Tom.

Because I’m going to try and be positive about Silverwood from this point forward – after all, we all want the same thing i.e. to make the test team less embarrassing and hopefully even quite good at some point – I’m not going to dwell on the first point. I’m just going to repeat his words and leave them hanging in the air like the whiff of stilton at a steak restaurant …

People are the centre of my coaching philosophy … seeing them do well with their dreams, and what they’re trying to do, makes me smile. That’s why I do it. I want to create self-thinking, self-sufficient cricketers that will be successful, and if we can do that, you know what, it’ll make me smile.

One, two, three … ahhhh. How sweet. Anyway. On to the important bit. The bit where we discuss whether winning is everything. Or most it it. Or some of it. Or none of it.

Apparently Giles said that ‘winning’ was not top of mind when he appointed Silverwood. His biggest concern was to uphold the ECB’s new Inspiring Generations strategy document, which is all about ‘inspiring generations’ by creating ‘the most respected team in the world.

Silverwood was asked to articulate what this means:

Ultimately, you want to be successful (phew! Ed) but it’s how you are successful as well … so it’s winning in the right spirit of the game. Winning with a little bit of class, and respecting your opposition as well. Respect is a big word. It’s very easy to talk about, but we’re going to make sure that we respect everything around us, everybody around us, and the game”.

I was quite impressed by this answer to be honest. Silverwood was given a hospital pass by his employers in the biggest press conference of his life and he managed to answer without either laughing or crying – although the odour of camembert was still unmistakably present.

However, there’s a serious point to all this. And it’s something I wanted to discuss with you today. You all know that I’m a miserable old sod, and that I don’t buy management speak or cheesy cliches, but I appreciate that other people do. So therefore I wanted to ask everyone how much you buy into this ‘respect’ philosophy. Is winning everything to you? Or is it important to win with class?

I think this is an interesting debate because many of us were brought up in an era when the Aussies regularly handed our arses to us on a plate. They didn’t just beat us; they ground us into the dirt, humiliated us ad nauseam, and made it blatantly obvious that they absolutely loved every minute of doing so. They called our bowlers ‘pie chuckers’, called our batsmen ‘soft’, and sledged us liberally – even when they were miles ahead in the game and the Ashes had already been won (usually by the third day of the third test).

Back then I hated the Aussie for both their brilliance and their arrogance. I wanted to win at all costs. And I didn’t particularly care how we did it. But then, when Andrew Flintoff put his arm around Brett Lee at the end of that dramatic Edgbaston test in 2005, I discovered that there was one thing even better than beating Australia: beating them magnanimously.

The great thing about beating the Aussies magnanimously was that they couldn’t even say we were ‘bad winners’ (which had been our only comeback when they were thrashing us for years). The Aussies therefore simply had nothing left in the banter stakes. We were better than them, plus we were better people too.

However, one can only win magnanimously if one wins first. The magnanimous bit is just the icing on the cake. Therefore haven’t Ashley Giles and the ECB got all this the wrong way around? Who wants to be respected if we’re getting thrashed every week?

Perhaps the ECB see themselves as benevolent visionaries in the cutthroat world of international sport and a shining example to mankind. I dunno. But what I do know is that kids have always been inspired by winners not good losers. They’d much rather be Mike Tyson than Frank Bruno. Therefore I just don’t see the logic in their approach.

A couple of years ago Tom Harrison made an infamous intervention when he asked the England team to play attacking cricket to entertain the crowds and risk losing in order to win. Now it looks like they’ve substituted attacking cricket for respectful cricket in their quest to grow the game.

I have to say I’m sceptical and a little incredulous at this approach. The most inspiring cricketer when I was growing up was Shane Warne. Everyone wanted to be Shane Warne and do Shane Warne impressions in the schoolyard. Kids loved him first and foremost because he was bloody good. And they also loved him because he was a rebel. Whether he respected the game or not really didn’t come into it.

Although we’re told as kids that winning isn’t everything, this is just a sop to make us feel better when we come last in the egg and spoon race. Unfortunately things are very different in the real world. Winning does matter. Success does matter. And it possibly matters more in the world of international sport than any other profession.

Or am I wrong?

James Morgan

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16 comments

  • Ask any top flight professional footie manager and you’ll get the answer pretty quick.
    Professional sport is a business and nothing succeeds like success. It is run largely by suits who’s only measure of success is profit. If any art crops up, like a Gower, it’s inspite of not because of it.
    Personally my sporting memories as a punter are about moments which are dominated by the maverick personalities that are being squeezed out of so many sports as undesirables. Think of all those great creative footballers of the 70’s. What wouldn’t we give for a bit of Bowles, Marsh, Currie, Hudson, Worthington, George, etc largely ignored by the England set up of their time as disruptives, because of their off field lifestyle, incompatible with a true professional sportsman.
    I can only think of Snooker, a sport of individuals, which has spawned the likes of Higgins, White, O’Sullivan and Trump as the inspiration to future generations, which seems to throw up players to put bums on seats as much for the moments of brilliance you get whether they win or lose, yet they are tolerated by that game. It is much more difficult to stand out in team sports. We have Cipriani in Rugby as a case in point. A true maverick, capable of these moments but seen by the modern team culture coaches as a liability.
    In cricket we have Stokes, who’s off field behaviour is under constant scrutiny. These days you can make any accusation against anyone and it sticks, irrespective of its truth content. The old fake news syndrome. How many will not believe his wife when she dismissed the media implication of an assault by him on her this week as ludicrous, saying they were just playing around. So Stokes has another black mark against his reputation, however ill deserved. Will the straight laced Giles believe him of give him a lecture?
    We should treasure and encourage natural talent, not let fear constrain it. We need to recognise those possessing a true gift cannot be churned through the mill of mediocrity that most of us have to adapt to. They are special, like it or not, and draw their inspiration from a different planet, we can never understand.
    They are the entertainers who give us the moments that keep us interested in the sports we love.

  • First impression is this: Do we really need this – are we HONESTLY so bad that we need to be “Nice”?

    More to the point, is this a sporting or a political decision? Politics, as in politicians are people who sledge, threaten, lie and scream at each other. Is this reaction from the ECB, a slight of hand move to make cricke more “nice” than British politics?

    Surely, (as James says in his Flintoff/Lee mention), our cricket team can be both competitive and “nice”. Do we really want our Ashes team to go to the next Ashes with Sam Curran saying to Warner “Hi David, I’m Sam and I’m “nice”? Or Joffrey, peppering Smith with 90+ MPH bouncers and instead of looking him in the eye with “Nearly gotcha”, ambles up to $%&%ing Steve, with “I’m so sorry, I’m “nice” really?

    WTF?

    Will that earn” respect”?

    I doubt that’ll be the word the Aussies use!

  • You’re mostly right James but a small caveat should be made. Of course England should be uncompromisingly competitive on the pitch. But do we really want Stuart Broad’s theatrics when he knew he was out? Or to emulate the Windies under Lloyd with their embarrassingly bad response to embarrassingly bad umpiring in NZ 1979/80? (Albeit the picture of Holding kicking the stumps over has long been used by choreographers of the Moulin Rouge, according to a Jamaican friend of mine.) Or Douglas Jardine to be summoned by a medium to act as the team’s ethics advisor on Anglo-Australian relations?

    I suppose if they thought about it they might refer to Brendon McCullum’s time heading the NZ cricket team, who played hard but never broached the spirit or the letter – or indeed the 2019 WC final, as hard a game of cricket as has been played, yet with an excellent spirit throughout. No tedious sledging for a start.

    Albeit I’d still have Warne as the second pick of my all time Australian XI …

  • Nice?Respect? Sounds like an extension to the PC culture to me. Actually gansters and drug dealers demand “respect”or they shoot you.
    Play the game hard and speak to people like you’d like to be spoken to yourself is a good maxim. You can’t have a team of all polite nice boys, people are not like that and don’t need to be put in a bubble by some psych babble. Society is plagued by “experts” trying to dictate how we live. Men just need to be managed sensibly to get the best from them.

  • Couldn’t give a monkeys whether we’re nice, liked, respected, whatever, just want to win. In fact, thinking about it, I’d rather everyone hated us because we kept battering them, and we did it in the least gracious fashion possible. Never enough to win, whoever you’ve beaten has to know they’ve lost.

  • The way to get respect is by playing good cricket. The stronger your performances are, the more people will respect you, even if they hate you.

  • Conduct on the field does matter. A case in point is the almost forgotten Greg Chappel, one of the great Aussie batsmen of any generation, who’s reputation was irredeemably sullied by his decision as captain to get brother Trevor to bowl an underarm roller at the death of a one dayer against New Zealand.
    Even his compatriot Ritchie Benaud, not renowned for emotional outbursts, commentating for Channel 9, launched into a long diatribe condemning it as an sickening offence against the spirit of the game.

    • “Almost forgotten”? Not by the Kiwi’s – they bring it every time they play Australia.

      The best comment about the incident was by Bill Lawry who said of Greg Chappell “At least he kept it in the family.”

  • The easy bit of this is to turn it round. We don’t want the England XI to be perpetrating the next sandpaper stratagem. We don’t want them to be world champion sledgers. If either of these is necessary to winning, we don’t need to win that badly. But we don’t want them to be some sort of happy-clappy evangelists for niceness in cricket. We suspect that would not generate respect, and might be sufficiently at odds with the competitive nature of the game that we wouldn’t win much either.

    The harder bit is to capture what we do want. First, we want them to be skilful and professional, and to play hard, with determination; Stokes at Leeds is a pretty good template. Batsmen need to sell their wickets dearly, bowlers to bowl with purpose to a plan. There is room in top cricket for style and humour, too. Also (but not everyone agrees) for the odd Tiger Moth.

  • We live in a PC age, where we want success but don’t want to encourage the competitive behaviour that often comes with it, meaning someone has to be a loser at the winner’s expense. Hence the ludicrous campaign in schools to discourage competitive sports as this harms child development, creating inferiority complexes. Yet on the other hand the entire education system is based around the Ofsted loonies, who measure success by exam results. If this doesn’t create those complexes I don’t know what does. We are not educated, merely taught how to pass exams. So we are left with a grade system that devalues knowledge and understanding, discouraging us to question, just blindly accepting text books as definitive, even though they are conscantly being rewritten as new information comes to light. It’s like saying driving lessons teach you to drive. This is patent nonsense, as we all know it’s what happens afterwards that teaches you, driving lessons are merely designed to help you pass your test.
    How many clever, yet ignorant people are we producing. With more information available than ever before are people generally more intelligent, clearly not. Education should teach us how to think, not what to think.
    Sorry this diatribe has gone slightly ‘off piste! so to speak, but it is relevant to our conformist tendencies.

  • Surely you can play hard, play FAIR and if you cut out all the antics (verbals basically) then you are in fact playing to win AND being nice !! It’s really not hard tbh

    What we have is a large generation of players who think verbals means you’re more competitive than others and this puts people off the game whilst having zero effect on performance for anyone..

    Aka pointless

  • Gamesmanship has always been to the fore in professional sport, as anything you can do within the law is considered acceptable. ‘After all it’s the same for both sides’, is the argument. Winding the opponent up to induce an intemperate response is just part of competitive human nature.
    With the advent of the Test World Champoinship, designed to give test cricket a purpose beyond each series, which most folk seem happy with, results have become even more important and it is reasonable to assume as the stakes get higher, behaviour on the pitch will become even more competitive. Sledging per se has become more difficult in this PC age as racist, sexist and gender abuse are now criminal offences, so hopefully we will see it confined to ridiculing cricketing ability, which you get plenty of in club cricket as well.
    Gone, if it ever really existed, is the traditional amateur, well played sir, type of respect for an opponent. Now the pressure is on to get in their faces and not give them too much respect, seeing them as a threat.
    It would be great to play sport in a mutually respectful and friendly environment and much of amateur sport is still played with that intention, but it undoubtedly waters down competitive instinct.

  • Just a postscript to the above. In Boxing, even at the highest level, there’s traditionally a lot of gamesmanship before a fight, but most of the time the 2 protagonists, after knocking the crap out of each other for the best part of an hour, embrace in a show of mutual respect.
    Other sports could learn a lesson from this as it is possible to detach oneself from the contest to such a degree so soon after the event and return to relatively civilised behaviour.
    Learn to leave what goes on during the contest behind when it’s over and realise it’s rarely personal. This way you can remain competitive on the field but keep a healthy perspective about it afterwards.

  • There is three things I tell my junior team we are trying to do
    1. Have fun and play nicely
    2. Get better each game.
    3. Win games

    In that order although all three are inter-related. Which I think is right for 11-12 year olds. All good for kids learning to play. Maybe even for social club cricket that’s ok.

    For professionals the same things apply but in the opposite order.

    • Nice summing up Steve.
      The caviat to this is that a professional sportsman has to have a winning mindset in order to continue in their chosen career, even if that mindset doesn’t win most of the time. There are professional sportsmen who never win a thing, a case in point being golf, where tournament winners are a rarity, but you can still earn a living by finishing high enough up the rankings to qualify to enter these tournaments and get a guaranteed pay day at least. The individual here is surrounded by talent so that’s not in itself enough to succeed. You have to have a competitive instinct stronger than those around you to progress to a point where you have a realistic chance of being a winner. The sacrifices you have to make in order to do this make it impossible to continue without any hope of success, so a winning mentality has to be a part of your make up.

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