Good Thing Bad Thing, Who Knows?

Carol Hickson

Let me tell you about a young therapy client I saw recently. ?They play academy football and, at ten years old, the fear of failure has started to make them anxious.? They are terrified that they will let their team down.? At training instead of going to play and doing their best, they stay on the sidelines.? Their fear stopping them from joining in with their teammates.

Given the recent football fallout I'm starting to understand their worry.? You see their parents and I have told them that this is a team effort and that they aren’t any more responsible than any of the other players when they lose.? They sadly see it differently and so instead of getting on the pitch and having fun, they are worried about what everyone will think of them if the other side win.? So more and more they choose not to play to avoid any fallout and the disappointment of other people.

As grownups we tell our children there is no “I” in team.? We say just go out and do your best and enjoy it!? It doesn’t seem to be working, what has changed?

Don’t get me wrong I spent enough time watching my sons play junior football to know that not every parent thinks like that.? I remember two games being cancelled because of parental behaviour and abuse to nine-year-olds but, we have to hope that these people are exceptions rather than the norm because otherwise, what crazy messaging are we giving our kids?

That a game is more important than their self-esteem?? That the act of kicking a ball is worth more than the self-worth of the individuals who make up the team?

This weekend the old familiar feelings from those years of watching my boys play under 10’s football came back to me.? The bullying and the name calling, the angry voices across the pitch, and the faces of those who absorbed every raised voice and name call.? It all came back to me this weekend because we didn’t win.? We weren’t the victors.? ?We felt let down and we wanted someone to blame.? But feelings aren’t facts.? Facts are facts and the fact is that we got further than any English team in the last sixty years.? We did it without drama and without dirty play.? We got to the final match, and it still wasn’t enough because somewhere along the lines we have made winning the only goal.? Don’t get me wrong winning is great, but I’d rather win at life than win a game.? ??

The truth is the English team didn’t make us feel good.? We felt let down.? These feelings are down to us not them.? It’s time we owned them.? Took responsibility.? Just as many parents with their children many of us live vicariously through our sports people.? There’s an expectation somehow that they owe us for supporting them.? The job of those in professional sport is to perform to the best of their capabilities and put on a good show for the spectators as an added bonus.? Match after match the England team have done that playing in the finals of major tournaments.? They gave us hope, a common dream, some unity, and not winning shouldn’t detract from that.? It felt glorious to dream.?

Instead, we get angry, overwhelmed by our emotions and instead of looking inwards and wondering why such a visceral reaction, we call for the resignation of the England coach.? This after his team has gone further than any English team in recent memory. ?This after months, if not years of nasty jibes, and comments about his abilities.? So does that mean that there is an “I” in team after all? That the parents and I have been kidding ourselves and that at ten years old my client already understands blame culture??

If that's the case, then I believe that we have let our children down.? Quite frankly I’m sick of “name and shame”.? I’m sick of scape-goating and I’m tired of pseudo-experts and their loudly expressed opinions.?

I confess to being fond of Gareth Southgate.? He got me back into watching football.? After all the sagas around Sven and Nancy, the weekend dramas of young footballers out on the razz I lost interest in a game that I grew up watching and loving.? Then along came a manager who started to build a team from the top down.? He cared about manners and behaviour, and he understood role modelling and how important that is especially to our young people.? It’s not just a concept to Gareth Southgate.? He lives his values.? He expects his players to do the same.? The lives of professional footballers come with great privilege; they also come with risk.? In my lifetime I can think of George Best and Paul Gascoigne; two incredible players on the pitch.? Both out of control off it.? Unlike the young talents that in the past we raised on pedestals, the England players appear humble.? Instead, of destroying themselves they understand self-restraint.? In large part that’s due to Gareth Southgate.? He has taught them self-respect, humility and boundaries.? And they wear them modestly just like the man himself.

In the last few years politics has shown us that people can get so focused on results that they lose the bigger picture sometimes to the detriment of the country.? The narrative around football has been the same. ?The mindset has become; let’s not applaud this team’s achievements under Gareth instead, let’s all be back seat football coaches yelling our opinions like the yobs of old.?

The English players respect their coach in fact, the affection in which they hold him is clear.? In therapy we know that successful outcome requires a strong client/therapist relationship.? Relationships matter.? By blaming Gareth Southgate, I can’t help but think of the old saying “don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.”? I’m worried that this abrupt end to his tenure will do even more damage to team morale and therefore, progress.? Yes, we expect the whole team to reflect on what could have been better and how they would do it differently next time but that is feedback; it’s not failure.

But instead, we jump to the blame game, a game at which this country excels, and I surely can’t be the only person who thinks it’s tiresome.? Pretty much the whole recent Tory election campaign was taking shots at Labour rather than honestly communicating with the voters.? The narrative aimed at Gareth Southgate has been unpleasant for a long time.? How many of us could do our jobs as well as he has if across the media everybody is suddenly an expert in what we do?? Who would want to work in those conditions?? Who would do their best work with the doubters chanting across from them?? I honestly don’t know how he didn’t run out of patience with all of the football pundits in the commentator’s box a long time ago.? I looked up the meaning of pundit on Sunday evening just before the match began, in part because they were spoiling my enjoyment of what has been a great tournament.? Pundit comes from Sanskrit and means “Learned Man” and I looked at the former players full of their own importance saying everything that is bad about English football, this team and in particular this coach and I couldn’t help thinking “really, learned men?? Where’s their wisdom then?”

You see wise people look to strengths.? They don’t get caught up in the quicksand of mistakes, where so many of us sink, but understand that these are learning opportunities.? They know that the answer to our problems lies in our strengths.? And when we don’t recognise those because we are caught up in the moment, wise men remind us to take a breath, recover our dignity and remember who we are and what we stand for.? They press home our achievements, and they stand as proxy at our sides until the red mist fades and we remember our achievements too.? This is the foundation on which the wise build.? Anybody can call names and cast blame, but a wise man knows that our strength lies in our foundations and if we have seen nothing else, we have seen a team build the most incredible foundations under this coach.

Time and time again, as a country we seem to get so hung up on expectations that we become careless of foundations until it all comes crashing down again.? It’s become a national pattern.

There was no failure on Sunday evening.? A game of two sides has a winner and a loser, it’s not rocket science.? It’s not drama.? It’s fact.? Tournaments come down to a mixture of skill, fatigue and luck on the night.? If we forget that we then we send our young sports people out with a winner or loser attitude and who on earth would want to ever play sport in a world so black and white?? Because even the best sports people lose sometimes and sometimes the luckiest win.

So I when I see my young client again, despite the furore in the media, I will stick to my belief that the English team is built of player/coaches/back room staff and it doesn’t all rest on one pair of shoulders because why on earth would any young person ever want to take part in competitive sport ever again?

A wise man I follow on LinkedIn once said “Don’t get hung up on outcome.? Good thing bad thing who knows?”

I believe that Tuesday, and not Sunday, was a bad day for English sport.? I hope that Gareth Southgate rises like a Phoenix and continues to inspire, and I sincerely believe that when we are ready our players will lift a football cup again.? Perhaps that will happen when the “wise men” wind their necks back in and learn some modesty themselves.? ?