The Seeds of Decline
Credit:
Success comprises in itself the seeds of its own decline and sport is not spared by
this law - Pierre de Coubertin (1863-1937)
Conan Byrne’s article about identity and positivity in the league earlier this week got me thinking. There’s a soccer mad friend of mine who lived, for 20 years it must be noted, in the shadow of Tolka Park but only twice graced the ground with his presence. The first occasion for a cousin’s 21st, the second to sit in the dark as an extra all night to play the part of a football supporter in the straight to video Mad About Mambo back in 2000, a film where a love struck footballer takes up mambo dancing in a bid to impress the girl of his dreams but later finds that importing mambo dancing into his side’s tactics brings considerable success – how the practice has not since been put onto the course for coaches doing their A Licence is beyond me.
I digress, no matter how vigorous the attempts made were to convince said friend to dip his toe into the waters of League of Ireland, they ended up in vain. Last weekend as in excess of 13,000 fans attended the opening weekend of the Premier Division, my mate was on a bus and ferry package to go see the English Premier League team with whom he feels a greater affinity play.
The choice is his prerogative, one I won’t criticise, a journey I have made myself on occasions. I don’t necessarily subscribe to the view that we have an obligation to support a domestic club, that Stephen Ireland has an obligation to play for Ireland or that any of you have an obligation to agree with the views I have. Conan’s hit the nail on the head though when he talks about the unique sense of pride that exists in watching your local team, enjoying banter unique to a local crowd, meeting the same fans in the same seats week in week out and so on. But does my mate have an equally valid point when he expresses his view that he’s currently turned off the league because in his mind from watching on, investing emotionally in your team achieving success is ultimately followed up by pain and hardship as we have witnessed at Bohemians, Cork City, Sporting Fingal and so on.
The negativity that people talk about towards the league isn’t unique to soccer and isn’t new, all you have to do is go back over some of the coverage directed towards the Irish rugby team in recent weeks or through archives to read some of the coverage of John Giles’ time in charge of Rovers in the 70s to see how his efforts were dismissed from day one such was the distain with which some observers wrote about the state of domestic soccer.
I had reason through work to spend time with Professor Aidan Moran of UCD last year to talk at length about sport psychology; ultimately we got around to the challenge of criticising people or teams without it impacting greatly on their long term mentality. It has been proven that you can spend all the time you want building players up and telling them how great they are but once the “but” comes in following by even a minor criticism the brain changes approach, deletes the positive and focuses instead on the negative.
Imagine the challenge that exists in counter acting so many decades of such negative coverage which relates to the league and has seeped into so many people’s consciousness. No matter how good the Cup Final was, how tense and competitive the races for the Premier and First Division titles were it is just part of the human psyche that the positives, no matter how large, will be eclipsed by the hammering at the hands of Manchester United, the coverage around Bohemian FC, the sudden demise of Sporting Fingal and the other pre-conceptions people have picked up over the years. I don’t have an answer to counteracting this image but what worries me more is that I don’t see evidence that too many others have one either.
I don’t think true fans of the League would object to their being some short term suffering before the League gaining more prominence and respect if there was any sign that there was light at the end of the tunnel. But does that glimmer in the distance exist? I know of one old sage of Irish football who refers to the league as Sisyphus, the king in Greek mythology who was forced to roll a boulder up a hill only to see it roll back down once he had almost achieved his goal, every time the ;eague does some good it’s undone almost immediately.
Conan Byrne’s article about identity and positivity in the league earlier this week got me thinking. There’s a soccer mad friend of mine who lived, for 20 years it must be noted, in the shadow of Tolka Park but only twice graced the ground with his presence. The first occasion for a cousin’s 21st, the second to sit in the dark as an extra all night to play the part of a football supporter in the straight to video Mad About Mambo back in 2000, a film where a love struck footballer takes up mambo dancing in a bid to impress the girl of his dreams but later finds that importing mambo dancing into his side’s tactics brings considerable success – how the practice has not since been put onto the course for coaches doing their A Licence is beyond me.
I digress, no matter how vigorous the attempts made were to convince said friend to dip his toe into the waters of League of Ireland, they ended up in vain. Last weekend as in excess of 13,000 fans attended the opening weekend of the Premier Division, my mate was on a bus and ferry package to go see the English Premier League team with whom he feels a greater affinity play.
The choice is his prerogative, one I won’t criticise, a journey I have made myself on occasions. I don’t necessarily subscribe to the view that we have an obligation to support a domestic club, that Stephen Ireland has an obligation to play for Ireland or that any of you have an obligation to agree with the views I have. Conan’s hit the nail on the head though when he talks about the unique sense of pride that exists in watching your local team, enjoying banter unique to a local crowd, meeting the same fans in the same seats week in week out and so on. But does my mate have an equally valid point when he expresses his view that he’s currently turned off the league because in his mind from watching on, investing emotionally in your team achieving success is ultimately followed up by pain and hardship as we have witnessed at Bohemians, Cork City, Sporting Fingal and so on.
The negativity that people talk about towards the league isn’t unique to soccer and isn’t new, all you have to do is go back over some of the coverage directed towards the Irish rugby team in recent weeks or through archives to read some of the coverage of John Giles’ time in charge of Rovers in the 70s to see how his efforts were dismissed from day one such was the distain with which some observers wrote about the state of domestic soccer.
I had reason through work to spend time with Professor Aidan Moran of UCD last year to talk at length about sport psychology; ultimately we got around to the challenge of criticising people or teams without it impacting greatly on their long term mentality. It has been proven that you can spend all the time you want building players up and telling them how great they are but once the “but” comes in following by even a minor criticism the brain changes approach, deletes the positive and focuses instead on the negative.
Imagine the challenge that exists in counter acting so many decades of such negative coverage which relates to the league and has seeped into so many people’s consciousness. No matter how good the Cup Final was, how tense and competitive the races for the Premier and First Division titles were it is just part of the human psyche that the positives, no matter how large, will be eclipsed by the hammering at the hands of Manchester United, the coverage around Bohemian FC, the sudden demise of Sporting Fingal and the other pre-conceptions people have picked up over the years. I don’t have an answer to counteracting this image but what worries me more is that I don’t see evidence that too many others have one either.
I don’t think true fans of the League would object to their being some short term suffering before the League gaining more prominence and respect if there was any sign that there was light at the end of the tunnel. But does that glimmer in the distance exist? I know of one old sage of Irish football who refers to the league as Sisyphus, the king in Greek mythology who was forced to roll a boulder up a hill only to see it roll back down once he had almost achieved his goal, every time the ;eague does some good it’s undone almost immediately.
