Eddie Butler, in his opening video montage on top of which he purrs about the upcoming Championship, strayed into dangerous territory this afternoon. He suggested that Wales 'should have' beaten France and didn't because of Warburton's red card (a debatable issue, unlike the missed kicks) and that France 'should have' beaten New Zealand, though it's not clear why.
Did Wales 'deserve' to beat France? Of course not. Did France 'deserve' to beat New Zealand? Don't be silly. What gives either of these teams the right to win anything? Is it because some feel that they were wronged? 'We were all bitched from the start'. The score board is the great leveller, the inarguable friend and foe. It is the only constant and must be respected. Sometimes it is your friend, sometimes your enemy.
The best starting point for any sport is that no one deserves anything. The word 'deserve' should be obliterated from the vocabulary of anyone with a genuine interest in sport. Unless, that is, unless it features in Jonny Wilkinson's mantra, 'get what you deserve'. This has seemed to me to be a fair and rewarding way of approaching the game.
Otherwise you leave yourself open to blaming other people - referees, the weather, the hotel, the food, the pitch. All this was summed up by Jim Telfer on the 1997 Lions tour in his famous speech about the British abroad.
People who use the word 'deserve' are the same people who, in football, claim that a team that has 20 shots on target and scores 0 goals has more of a right to win, or deserves a win, more than a team that has 1 shot on target and scores 1 goal. The only way to approach this is to accept that your strikers must improve. Any other response will slow down a team's development.
You create your own luck and you get what you deserve. That simply must be the starting point for any team. That way, no room is left for complaining, for evading responsibility, for blaming defeats on others. Everything that happens is our fault, wins or defeats. What is the point of training if we aren't to accept this as fact?
It denies weakness and turns it all back on you: how hard you practised, how hard you wanted it. Players become empowered, referees become irrelevant. That's the sort of team Scotland must become. More importantly, that's the sort of attitude that Scotland's fans must adopt. Until then, it'll always be someone else's fault.
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