War Minus the Shooting is Not Actually War

It is a truth universally acknowledged that the pundit seeking heft to support his argument must eventually turn to George Orwell. This is, for sure, often a wise decision since much the most remarkable aspect of Orwell's writing is how much of it remains vivid and even valid today. But not all of it since Eric Blair was as capable of talking through his hat as the next intellectual. Thus John Quiggin, writing about the Olympic torch's travels across Australia, cites Orwell's view that:

Even if one didn’t know from concrete examples (the 1936 Olympic Games, for instance) that international sporting contests lead to orgies of hatred, one could deduce it from general principles.

There's a missing "can" there whose omission condemns Orwell. To observe that Situation A can lead to Situation B is far from the same thing as claiming that it must. True, we can all cite examples that might seem to confirm, albeit on a superficial level, Orwell's thesis: the Soccer War, football hooliganism and so on... but these are, in point of fact, rarities. Sport can be illused but that says more about the users than it does about sport or competition itself.

In his essay, The Sporting Spirit, Orwell suggests that:

If you wanted to add to the vast fund of ill-will existing in the world at this moment, you could hardly do it better than by a series of football matches between Jews and Arabs, Germans and Czechs, Indians and British, Russians and Poles, and Italians and Jugoslavs, each match to be watched by a mixed audience of 100,000 spectators. I do not, of course, suggest that sport is one of the main causes of international rivalry; big-scale sport is itself, I think, merely another effect of the causes that have produced nationalism. Still, you do make things worse by sending forth a team of eleven men, labelled as national champions, to do battle against some rival team, and allowing it to be felt on all sides that whichever nation is defeated will "lose face".

It's true that Olympic-partisans make too much of the idea that the games represent some glorious global festival in which we celebrate our common humanity and all the rest of it. Much, perhaps even most, of this is humbug. But not all of it. Orwell complains that even a game as supposedly genteel as cricket can unleash fierce passions. He cites the threat to UK-Australian diplomatic relations by the 1932-33 Bodyline Series to support this point. But this is precisely wrong: such a threat, like the other occasions in which politics intrude, is a diversion from the main point, not an example supporting Orwell's contention.

In this instance it's pretty clear that cricket is the single most significant tie that binds England and Australia together. The Queen may be head of state of both countries, but it is cricket even more than shared and exchanged bloodlines that unites England and Australia. The biannual tussle for The Ashes is, of course, supremely important but it too is actually secondary to the game itself, a shared delight that does in fact bring people from opposite ends of the earth together just as surely - and in fact more so - as Shakespeare or Mozart may. If an Englishman meets an Australian in deepest, darkest Peru the odds are good that the conversation will, sooner rather than later, turn to cricket.

There is rivalry, for sure, and, equally, it can be heated, intemperate stuff. But when the hurly-burly's done with, it's the game that endures, rising above partisanship. Hence the ovation Bradman received at the Oval in 1948 or, more recently the fond farewell's to Glen McGrath and Shane Warne that expressed more than just a relief they would no longer be around to torment English batsmen. Beauty and artistry rise above borders, uniting aficionados regardless of their ancestry or allegiance.

Sport then, actually is a unfiying force. Indians have no monopoly on appreciating Sachin Tendulkar, nor are trinidadians the only folk able to derive genuine pleasure from watching Brian Lara bat. In cricket, even more than in other sports, there's an appreciation of the aesthetics of the game that transcends individual allegiances. Hence the youngster's seemingly contradictory desire to see Australia win, but Denis Compton to make a century.

Nor is this limited to cricket. The rugby Six Nations championship is an annual opportunity for renewing ties of rugby kinship. The biannual trips to Dublin or Paris or Cardiff or, now, Rome are festivals of sport. The result matters but there's no real hatred involved, no, not even when playing England. To the extent that such ugliness exists - as it did at Murrayfield in the early 1990s - it's something that most thinking Scottish fans look back upon with distaste. For a few years the game was freighted with more significance than it could comfortably bear, producing a racouress, chippy, resentful atmosphere that did no one much credit. Happily this sentiment seems to have waned in recent years and the atmosphere at Murrayfield this year was happier than it had been in the past (it helped, mind you, that Scotland - mirabile dictu - actually won).

Again, Orwell writes, in the most famous passage of his essay:

Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence: in other words it is war minus the shooting.

Of course, war minus the shooting is not, actually, quite the same as war with shooting. You might even conclude that it isn't war at all.

But to the extent that Orwell's pithy, oft-quoted, claim holds any water it is that it expresses the adolescent view of sport. Bill Shankly's line that "football isn't a matter of life and death, it's much more important than that" was somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but it's a view common amongst young men. Most of the time, most of use grow out of such blinkered passions. That's why it still rather shocks us to hear grown-men hurling filthy invective at referees or opposition players (especially when said men are accompanied by their young sons). Much of this, of course, may simply be heat-of-the-moment stuff, but it gives the sensible fan pause to wonder if Orwell might have had something of a point.

But no, the fact that some supporters abuse the point of sport doesn't invalidate all sporting allegiances. In the end the sensible fan knows that, despite all the sound and fury, it's just a game. Then again, this may be simply a matter of my discovering that the actual result of any game I'm engaged with is increasingly less important than other factors, such as how the game is played or the qualities and virtues demonstrated by the players involved.

To return to Orwell:

Nearly all the sports practised nowadays are competitive. You play to win, and the game has little meaning unless you do your utmost to win. On the village green, where you pick up sides and no feeling of local patriotism is involved. it is possible to play simply for the fun and exercise: but as soon as the question of prestige arises, as soon as you feel that you and some larger unit will be disgraced if you lose, the most savage combative instincts are aroused. Anyone who has played even in a school football match knows this. At the international level sport is frankly mimic warfare. But the significant thing is not the behaviour of the players but the attitude of the spectators: and, behind the spectators, of the nations who work themselves into furies over these absurd contests, and seriously believe--at any rate for short periods--that running, jumping and kicking a ball are tests of national virtue.
 

Well, up to a point. Some people - demagogues, dictators and the simple-minded - may see such activities as "tests of national virtue", but the majority of sports' fans do not see it as such. It is true that the 1980s saw too much of this sort of thing as the United States and the Soviet Union battled one another in athletic contests (albeit not the 1980 or 1984 olympics) and used these events as proxies in the Cold War battle of ideas. But most of the world was in the comfy position of wondering how it might be arranged that they could both lose - a sentiment given extra weight precisely because the USA and USSR burdened sport with too much significance, just as Apartheid South Africa set too much store by rugby. Doing so made them look ridiculous.

But there is no real contradiction between feeling local ties and being an internationalist. The pleasure we feel in seeing a countryman fare well in the boxing ring may be illogical given that we may share little with the fighter besides a common passport but we each contain multiple identities and hold layers of loyalty: to ourselves, to family, to friends, to our home town, our county, our country and so on. We may not choose to exercise or proclaim these loyalties and we may shed some layers of identification depending upon circumstance, but holding them does not prevent one from also being able to appreciate brilliance on the part of performers with whom we have nothing in common whatsoever beyond a sympathy for football or cycling or tennis.

Thus, the seeming paradox of sport simultaneously exacerbating and reducing partisan tensions. On the one hand we are keen, sometimes excessively so, for "our team" to win, on the other we realise that it's not always that important that we do so. And in the end the penny drops that you cannae have your team unless the opposition has theirs and that consequetly the field of play is, actually, a meeting-place. That in turn is something to be celebrated.

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'The rugby Six Nations championship is an annual opportunity for renewing ties of rugby kinship. The biannual trips to Dublin or Paris or Cardiff or, now, Rome are festivals of sport. The result matters but there's no real hatred involved, no, not even when playing England.'

Which was most evident when Ireland played England at Croke Park last year. It was a game played in the best traditions of the sport, and a good crowd atmosphere - despite the tragic history of the ground.

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