I DON’T often quote Rudyard Kipling – he’s rather out of fashion these days, and anyway, his Cherry Bakewells are too sugar-laden for my taste – but when it comes to the matter of facing up to a defeat, he had it pretty much spot on when he wrote: “If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster/And treat those two imposters just the same …”
The thing is, losing stinks. But unless you’re a bookmaker or Simon Cowell, it’s going to happen to you sooner or later. Most of us learn early in life that the thing to do is to get used to it.
This is especially true in the world of football. Trust me, I know, I’m a Hibs fan. As such, I’ve had my share of defeats; I learned the definition of stoicism (n., the endurance of pain or hardship without the display of feelings and without complaint), around the age of 10.
It hasn’t always been easy, though. The mask almost slipped in April, 2014, after an away game at St Mirren. Defeat had to be avoided at all costs; but Hibs went a goal behind after 12 seconds, and never recovered. The manager, Terry Butcher, put Zeno of Citium, the founder of the aforementioned school of philosophy, to shame: “Sometimes maybe it's a good thing if you lose an early goal because it takes away the threat of conceding because you have conceded,” he said. That one sorely tried my patience.
The boot, however, was on the other foot at the weekend. Hibs beat Alloa three-nil, and the opposing manager, Danny Lennon – a man whose habitual expression makes Clement Freud look like the Laughing Policeman – admitted afterwards that the strategy had been stonewall defence, before coming out with: “We were delighted with the game plan in the first half. The operation went well, but the patient died.”
Respect, Danny. Such logic is up there with the great Ruud Gullit’s “We must have had 99 per cent of the game. It was the other three per cent that cost us the match.”
Perhaps they teach those post-defeat soundbites as part of the coaching courses. If so, Scotland manager Gordon Strachan probably graduated top of his class. When asked in what areas the opposition had been better than his team, he once famously replied: “What areas? Mainly that big green one out there...”
My attitude, though, is probably best summed up by a famous player rather than a manager. When asked to explain Brazil’s defeat to France in the 1998 World Cup final, star striker Ronaldo replied simply: “We lost because we didn’t win.” I bet Terry Butcher would agree.
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