There are a few pretty lopsided first team rugby scores around the country and, no doubt, a few sore bodies and bruised egos around the schools on the receiving end during the week.
I’m always quick to admit that it’s easy for me to sprout platitudes from this platform, given that I don’t have the responsibility of coaching a team, and carrying the weight of expectation of victory that goes with it, but my immediate reaction when I saw those scores on Twitter, and I still feel that way now, is that they really don’t matter all that much.
I was a pretty incompetent coach at a rather ordinary rugby school in my coaching days, and I remember we did take quite a few pastings in my day, but I really can’t remember the details and I’m quite sure no one was emotionally or physically scarred by them.
The schools that were hammered last weekend certainly don’t need my advice. I guarantee you they declared “that’s behind us now, we have another game coming up, let’s make sure it doesn’t happen again”.
What has changed since the days when I used to stand at the side of the field looking at my watch every two minutes, praying it would all end soon, is the advent of social media.
It’s all become totally public, and anyone with a smartphone is an expert, able and often willing to voice an opinion. And what a load of nonsense was posted last weekend.
I have recounted before the quote I once read comparing the Twitter community to the drinkers at the bar in Chalmun’s Cantina in Star Wars(do a YouTube search for Star Wars – Mos Eisley cantina to see them).
It seemed that way on Saturday and I, quite inexplicably, was tagged in one person’s ongoing rant about how it was all a disgrace and how some schools have no right to be playing against others.
And, of course, there was plenty of schadenfreude, and arrogance on the part of those who have probably never been involved in serious sport, or who have forgotten that wheels turn and that if anything in life is sure, it’s that those who have made it to the top now will one day be at the bottom again.
Much of the twittering was about leagues and rankings – concepts that don’t actually exist in schools rugby and which have been constructed by those who run the social media sites – with the aim of being controversial and attracting readers.
They are successful in doing that, but we shouldn’t be taking those things seriously. There’s no logical way of justifying how they are drawn up and they almost always reflect the regional bias of those who compile them.
Most significantly, however, they don’t reflect the real reasons why the established schools play traditional fixtures against each other.
Sure, schools want to win, and any coach who has not given his all to prepare his team to be competitive should be fired.
But winning isn’t (as Vince Lombardi may or may not have said) the only thing.
To declare, as was done last weekend, that school A should not play school B next year because they were soundly beaten, across the age groups, doesn’t look at the bigger picture.
I don’t know what happens in any of the schools in question, but it’s probably true that school A has been playing rugby against school B every year for the last 20; there were probably 15-odd hockey matches between the two schools last Saturday; that the next time the two schools meet will be on the soccer field in two months’ time, and on the athletics track a few weeks later.
Then they will have a combined cricket, basketball and water polo fixture in the fourth term, and maybe a second one in the first term next year, by which time the date for next year’s rugby game will have been set.
So, let’s not take scores in particular games too seriously, except as a motivator ahead of the next time we meet. And we will meet again, that’s the really good thing about sport.