How refreshing to see a team lose in controversial circumstances and their coach concentrate on congratulating the opposition and calling out his own team’s indiscipline in dealing with it.
If that was a football game, they’d still all be whinging about the referee this time next year.
In rugby league, I’ve always noticed that a lot involved in the game have an attitude that you are wholly in control of the eventual outcome.
Referees and Video Refs can get things wrong, they can get things horribly wrong, they can get things wrong on the final hooter and affect the result at the end of the game, but there are 80 minutes for the team to get things right and there’s no point whinging about one moment in a game when the officials got something wrong because there are thousands of moments in a game to get things right yourself.
If you’re moaning about a referee’s decision affecting the result, that means you’ve done things wrong in those other thousands of moments for the game to get to the point where the officials can affect it.
If football could adopt that attitude, it would be a
much better sport for it!
Football is a good sport but it’s played by, coached by and watched by a bunch of cry babies to be honest. When things go wrong, it always seems to be someone else’s fault. Whether it’s Liverpool fans always looking to blame other sets of fans, the Police, the governing bodies, the facilities for their misdemeanours as a fanbase; or whether it’s City fans always looking to blame the referees, VAR, the governing bodies or corruption whenever City lose (or even draw) a game. Liverpool fans can’t seem to understand why it’s always their fanbase that’s involved in the same kind of things and too many City fans can’t seem to understand that when City lose or even just lose points, it’s our own fault.
Take the United game at Old Trafford the other month: the referee got something wrong in one moment of the game, but there are 5,400 moments in a game of football and apart from the odd moments City didn’t get much right. We were very poor on the day and let ourselves get into a situation where the referee could affect the game. We came out from half time and played quite well and scored a nice goal but in the first half we were abysmal and after we scored we kept giving the ball away and allowing United to get forward more which lead to their first goal and the referee getting something wrong. But even after that we were shit, our defending for their winner was atrocious. We were at fault for losing that day. The referee was shit but in all those thousands of other moments, so were we!
I wonder whether that figurative saying of having broad shoulders allowing you to take responsibility when things go wrong actually has a basis in reality?
