Screws Loose, or, Screws Fall Out

Sport is often framed as a microcosm of life: If we keep fronting up and battling on, eventually our hard-work and merit will be recognised, and rewarded, and we will overcome the odds and emerge triumphant. But this a false dawn.

Sport is enjoyable not because it reflects the experience of life but because of just the opposite; it portrays a fairness that everyday life does not contain. It has clear aims and objectives, the rules are the same for everyone, and they are enforced impartially and transparently, regardless of money or heritage or who your parents play squash with. And at the end of the game we are able to determine a clear victor. These are all things that do not apply to life.

Sport is such a popular spectator event because within these clear confines people and teams are able to push expected and accepted limits. We watch good athletes become great athletes, and we watch great athletes transcendent the very game itself. As LeBron James’ marketing team correctly, if not a little condescendingly, put it, “we are all witnesses”.

Bad umpiring disturbs this carefully created balance. It removes us from the theatre of sport and returns us to a life that is inherently unfair. It is the turd in the competitive punchbowl.

By the free kick statistics, Geelong hasn’t exactly had the rub of the green this season. In fact, they have conceded more free kicks than any other team and are tracking at the worst rate in 15 years. Of course, conceding free kick does not necessarily mean anything by itself; free kick statistics track decisions, they do not track good decisions, or bad decisions, or non-decisions. That is, there is no count of free kicks that were not paid but should have been, or the inverse, free kicks that were paid but should not have been.

In short, there appears to be no measure of umpire “correctness”, no accountability to consistency. Not only from week-to-week, but from contest-to-contest. And this is what turns average fans into conspiracy-theorist lunatics, lighting up message boards and talk-back radio.

From the weekend there were at least seven examples of clearly wrong decision, or non-decisions, which went against Geelong in their loss to St.Kilda, two of which happened in the final minutes and probably had a direct influence on the result. And although I’m sure that if I looked hard enough I could find examples of bad decisions that go against every team, every week (except Hawthorn, let’s be real here), it can’t help but feel like a season long pattern.

(Slightly related note: Going back a few weeks, it borders on incomprehensible that Tom Hawkins received a two-week suspension for a “jumper punch” when a week later in the Friday night game between Hawthorn and North Melbourne there were at least 25 such incidents without a single suspension, report, or even free kick being paid. Not to mention that psycho-midget Jack Viney threw 4 or 5 legitimate punches to his opponent’s head like he was Roy Jones Junior and received the exact same punishment as Hawkins. Sigh. What was I saying about lunatics?)

It is in these infuriating, helpless-feeling moments that we need to remind ourselves that complaining about umpiring is whinging. And like all whinging it is pointless at best, and antithetical at worst (Lindsay Thomas notwithstanding).

We need to remind ourselves to focus on process, that each outcome is a result of a myriad of previous outcomes. We need to remind ourselves to have short memories, that the past is not necessarily indicative of the future. We need to remind ourselves that there’s another team out there, which is just as talented and are trying just as hard. We need to remind ourselves that not every loss needs to be scrutinized and analysed and made a symptom of a grander issue, that sometimes you can just be a bit shit. We need to remind ourselves that it’s easy to be a gracious winner, but that true grace is only ever found in defeat.

Perhaps ultimately sport does represent life. And despite our small-scale, clearly delineated points of right and wrong, people will make mistakes, and there will be biases, and merit won’t always be rewarded. Perhaps sport, much like the indifferent universe it occurs in, will always find a way to fuck with you, and investing in things outside of our control is ultimately futile and often heart-breaking. As philosopher/vandal John Bender famously put it, “the world’s an imperfect place”.

Or perhaps we only need to remind ourselves that you don’t win premierships in June.