Soccer as Real Life

I watched a soccer game here between two teams I can't remember, but I think came from other countries in Europe. My Irish housemate was explaining to me that the last ten minutes were going to be pretty boring (by his standards) because the two teams were tied. Both teams benefited from the tie, so neither was necessarily going to make a move to break that, risking the loss. It seemed that the tie would award both teams the points needed to advance to something else. I really wasn't paying too much attention due to the mind-numbing boredom that watching a bunch of shorted men run around idly kicking a ball back and forth will bring about.

This was interesting: neither team wanted to take the risks necessary for a win, and both seemed complacent enough to settle for a tie. Most American sports cannot end in a tie (there are rare moments in football when the game, much to Donovan McNabb's surprise, can end in a tie, and hockey can often end in a tie). When the baseball All-Star game ended in a tie, fans went berserk, and a new rule was instituted so that the winning division gets home field advantage for the World Series to prevent such an atrocity from happening again (which lead to a really exciting game where both the American and National leagues had run out of pitchers and were thinking about trotting J.D. Drew and David Wright out for a few innings apiece). Essentially, America wants to see a winner. A tie is just as bad as losing, because no one can be crowned and hailed as the winner. This has led to some amazing sports moments: triple-over time basketball games, 21 inning baseball games, grueling sudden death overtime football games, shoot outs in non-tying hockey games, etc. America loves the heroes that come from these rare moments of athleticism where the man or woman reaches down deep to some undiscovered reserve of ability to pull the game out for his or her team.

The same is not true of soccer, and I found out, British people in general.

This past Sunday, I wandered down to Scholars for the Sunday night quiz, and Tyler's Freedom Dragons, smaller than usual, put up a good fight. We were about in the middle of the pack going into the Wipeout Round, the last round of the quiz. Here, a team needs to answer all questions correct to earn an extra five bonus points; consequently, any wrong answers took all the points away for that round. With 15 extra points, we could have made a stab at winning the game. This is highly unlikely, as most of the questions in this round are REALLY esoteric, but not beyond the realm of possibility. My attitude was to answer as many as we could justifiably guess at, and hope for the best; Jamie, one of the two British people looked instead to score as many points as he knew we could, and aim for the middle of the pack, rather than risk losing all our points and end up near the bottom.

This seemed insane to me. Some of the questions we had whittled it down to two or three possible answers. In these situations, there is an obvious course of action: go for the win. Attack the jugular, take no prisoners, shoot first and ask questions later, and so on. I saw an risky opportunity to move up into the top three, with the potential to win the game with some calculated risks; Jamie wanted to walk away in the middle of the pack, knowing that at least we didn't lose. But, I wanted to argue, we didn't win either.

It seemed to be a question of dignity. Jamie wanted to say that he finished above last place. That he wasn't the worst team in the bar, which I can certainly understand as no one wants to lose anything. My argument was that there were no prizes for second place, that no one wins without trying, that we don't necessarily lose with the worst score, but we still lose. Certainly, there is some dignity maintained by tying for the middle team, but as far as I was concerned, there was lost dignity for not having the balls to take the risk and try to win.

It's interesting to me how these attitude pervade everything we do: the British never want to lose, and will settle for a tie as then they don't have to lose; Americans want to win and settling for a tie is conceding to a lack of winner. Whether it's a Premiere League soccer match or a local pub quiz, if I don't at least try to win, I feel like I let myself, my team, and, depending on the stage, my country down. It would be interesting to see if these same attitudes can be seen elsewhere: politics, education, foreign relations and so on.