A love letter to losers
Potentially the sporting photograph of 2022 is something more akin to a renaissance painting. Paolo Garbisi, the Italian rugby out-half, sits slumped on the turf of the Principality stadium, his face overcome with emotion; in isolation, you might presume this to be the face of a losing athlete, the edges of his mouth downturned and eyes held almost-shut as if holding back tears; around his neck the tender hand of Tiziano Pasquali, the replacement Italian prop, held as if to pull him back from the brink of despair. Garbisi’s hand reaches out in a limp fist, as if grasping for something intangible and divine, Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam in savoy azure cotton.
And yet this is the face, at least in this one moment, of a winner. Garbisi had just landed a conversion with the last kick of the match, handing his side a shock 1-point victory over Wales and ending a thirty-six-match losing streak that stretched back for six years. The Italians still held up the bottom of the table come the end of that year’s 6 nations, finishing with a points difference of minus 121 and this solitary victory to their name. And yet it was a victory that brought forward a tidal wave of pent-up emotion, arguably one enjoyed by opposition fans more than any of their own nations’. The unbridled joy of Garbisi and his teammates only makes sense in the light of their industrious brio in the preceding thirty-six matches; a willingness to lace up their boots season after season, expecting to lose but with the faint, kindled hope of victory.
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The notion of the ‘loser’ as a label has always fascinated me. Growing up, the sporting arenas of my youth shared a common ideal that winning was at the very least desirable and at most the very reason for competing. Despite coming from an ‘it’s all about the taking part that counts’ household, this was shunted to one side by the arrival of secondary school and membership of outside sporting clubs, where grown men trained young men to win at all costs. As a ten-year-old, I vividly remember being coached in how to bend the ‘dark arts’ of footballing etiquette to make up for my small, unmuscular frame; a pulled shirt here, a swift elbow there. Whatever the referee didn’t see, effectively didn’t count. A fine margin worth risking a yellow card for, if it got our team a step closer to a win. And yet as I have aged into the world of puffing and panting Thursday night 5-a-side, seen a generation of household names retire from the sports I love and started to educate my son in the myriad complexities of the beautiful game(s), I have realised that the relationship between winners and losers should be seen in the same light as the adversarial legal system; two sides (divided often by luck rather than skill) playing their part in an unfolding narrative. An absurd narrative in which the loser is an as important and potentially more colourful, admirable character than the winner.
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My childhood memory is littered with admirable losers. I proudly wore a Portland Trailblazers cap following their four-point defeat in game six of the 1992 NBA finals to Michael Jordan’s Chicago Bulls. Five years later I realised the error of my ways in rooting for the underdog when I was roundly mocked by my peers at a summer camp for stating that perennial Wimbledon flop Greg Rusedski was my favourite tennis player (my hand-me-down wooden racket didn’t exactly help.) And I cut a lone figure in defending the actions of mercurial, generational footballing talent Zinedine Zidane after he went full Shakespearean villain, sent off for a brash and unprompted headbutt on his Italian counterpart Marco Materazzi in the 2006 World Cup final. (Zidane had opened proceedings with the most audacious chipped ‘panenka’ penalty on seven minutes, and was sent off 10 minutes before his side lost the titanic pan-continental struggle, ironically losing on penalties.)
Despite this innate love affair with losers of all stripes (the mad, bad and ugly) it has taken me the best part of three decades to realise that nourishment for the soul can be derived from accepting the inevitability of loss in competition. When my son (a total glory-hunter, as most 8-year-old boys are) asks me, perplexed, why I am rooting for the team more likely to lose, I want to distill for him the words of Walt Whitman from the epic poem Song of Myself, that ‘battles are lost in the same spirit in which they are won’. I want to point him towards the story of Corinthian F.C. whose name became synonymous with resolute amateurism. Founded in 1882, they pledged only to play friendlies and saw the giving away of penalties as such unsporting behaviour that their keeper would step out of the way, allowing the opposition to simply roll the ball into an empty goal.
When he asks why I routinely choose to be the infamously underachieving Tottenham on FIFA, I want him to hear the words of their finest-ever player Danny Blanchflower, that ‘the great fallacy is that the game is first and last about winning. It's nothing of the kind. The game is about glory. Or, as another Spurs man famously put it, ‘(we) have set our sights very high. So high in fact that even failure will have in it an echo of glory.’
Long live the losers.
