Sport, Glorious Sport (and Football)

The Glorious Island Games

As the Island Games is upon us, our happily provincial but no less important answer to the overly politicised Olympic Games, I am in awe of the beauty of competitive sport.

Watching the men’s basketball team play yesterday – gelling after a jittery first quarter, pulling through a torrent of Falkland Island fouls in the second and third, and making plenty of well-supported magic happen in-between – my friend and I instantly organised to play together next week.

Sport – hard teamwork towards a shared goal – is inspiring. You get a contact-high just from being there, let alone from playing it.

For a blab today, I want to share with you two things that came to mind whilst witnessing those special moments yesterday.

Firstly, a memory of a time I experienced such a buzz in sport (and what came to mind wasn’t any glory had playing rugby or basketball or boxing, or more recently and less sexily in dodgeball and netball).

Secondly, a couple of words about why I think sport is so important – not just to me, but for everybody, even if you don’t know it (yet).

My Less Than Illustrious Football Career

As anyone who knows me will know, I hold football in harsh and undying contempt for its breeding unsportsmanlike conduct by the normalisation of diving.

Yet, in primary school, all I wanted to be was good at the sport. Alas, I was podgy, uncoordinated, and slow. Better at reading than running.

Or, to say the same thing in a different way: in my tiny Catholic primary school, I was second-pick for goalkeeper. There were two kids to choose from, and the slightly fatter kid got it over me.

I stuck with football nevertheless, it being the only sport in town, the only one any kid ever spoke about anyway. I remember settling on Liverpool to “support” for no particular reason.

I was second-pick goalkeeper for North AC, too.

One game at the old St Peter Port School, our coach needed to involve me in the game, so he put me on in the second-half – as a striker. I barely had any experience on the pitch as goalkeeper, let alone outfield, and now suddenly I was up front with my podgy limbs popping out of my navy-blue kit.

Floating around, I was unsure what to do. All of a sudden, the ball arrives at my feet on the edge of the box. I take one touch, lean back and shoot for goal, the ball curling slightly and finding its way to the bottom-right corner of the net. My teammates run up to me cheering. I am elated.

Later in the match, I’m passed a through ball and I drive the ball past the keeper, scoring a second.

I remember my coach congratulating the team at the end of the game, and saying well done, ‘to our new striker Liam.’

Incidentally, I never scored another goal in football, and remain uninterested and incompetent in the sport to this day.

Yet the moment has stuck with me. As it happens, I grew into a sportier and more coordinated frame, became more interested in rugby, basketball and boxing, but I still remember being the fat kid in the wrong kit scoring two goals. I stood a little taller that day.

Where Would We Be Without Sport?

I often wonder, looking at sportspeople I know: where would you be without your sport? Where would you be without that mid-week discipline of training? Where would you be without those weekend interludes of competition and elation?

One boxer I know, gifted with talent backed by a vicious work ethic, said it simply to me: if I hadn’t found boxing, I’d be in prison. The same could be said for countless others.

Instead of that energy and thirst for recognition being spent and earned through destruction, it’s spent and earned through healthy competition, through a codified ritual simulating struggles that fortunately few of us have to face anymore.

We – and I mean we in Guernsey – don’t have to run for our survival, but we run and swim and ride several miles at a clip. We don’t have to build tank defences and fire cannonballs toward boats, but we drill defence and shoot for goal. We don’t have to fight invading hordes to the death in hand-to-hand combat, but we lace up our gloves and play gladiator.

Sport offers redemptive pathways, allowing for a positive release of energies that might otherwise be dormant or destructive.

Sport builds social groups around a positive activity and shared goal.

Sport creates opportunities to compete and win in a healthy manner in a world where it is difficult to win (in careers, relationships, etcetera).

Through sport, people aspire, achieve, overcome – and this momentum positively irradiates life.

For all of my disdain for big league big diving football, I must thank the sport for that.