When sport becomes unsporting

I've recently started playing cricket again in a last ditch attempt to extract my latent skills as an elite athlete. Well, not really. Actually, I've always wanted to play cricket in England. So far it's been quite an enjoyable experience. For instance, it's enabled me to visit parts of outer London I would never have otherwise seen and to frolic around lush green cricket fields lined with beautiful flowers and fancy-looking houses. The experience has also reminded me that my body and mind have changed some what since last I played. While I've always maintained a decent level of fitness, the niggles I pick up while throwing myself around take much longer to go away. My throwing arm is stronger and I hit the ball harder, but I certainly don't get as worked up as I used to. My greatest, wicked secret is that I don't particularly care if the team wins or losses provided I get a chance to play and run around and enjoy myself. Not all my team mates share these sentiments.

The average age of the team must be around 22 or 23. More than anything, playing competitive team sport again has reminded me of insights into masculinity I once thought were mere cliches. I play for a university team so the guys are generally well read, articulate and good humoured. There are some however who simply take everything all too seriously. For instance, our chirpy cover fieldsman, one of the best players in the team, is the stereotypical know-it-all sportsman who simply does not shut up. It does not help that he's around 20 and half my height (actually, more like 5'5'', and no I'm not 10'8''). Worst of all, he is constantly giving other players advice and criticism. Unfortunately, I was fielding at point for a large part of the day, about 10 metres from him, and it got to the stage where I simply had to tell the guy to can it. I literally, and quite unconsciously, did a 'zip-it' motion across my lips akin to Dr Evil. He looked at me stunned for a moment before the next ball was bowled. He wasn't so forthcoming with advice to me after that. I found the whole episode incredibly humorous but I thought it sensible to at least look like I was taking everything very seriously. We were, afterall, playing an amateur level game. One cannot take such things lightly.

Our wicketkeeper though had to take the cake. I sat next to him on the train ride to the ground and it was near impossible to get him to speak. On the field though he was enthusiastic with his words, if not his glovework which was rather poor. He dropped every single ball that headed his way, including those left alone by the batsman. It got so bad that I eventually had to stand at short fine leg, almost behind him, to stop the ball from racing to the boundary. Of course none of this would really matter in and of itself. That it did matter was not because he happened to be a little chubby and pink-cheeked. No. It was more of a factor of his tendency to keep telling off other fieldsmen for misfields or their lack of intensity. During team huddles he would reel off patronising one liners that would have made Ricky Gervais's character from The Office proud.

One reason I stopped playing competitive team sport some years ago was that I stopped enjoying myself. Matches became too serious and tense. It did not help that two of the last three teams I've played for were not very strong. The pressure to perform, to continually reappraise 'what went wrong' and for a few team mates to give everyone else advice on how to improve their game got to the point where I either switched off or started telling them to get a life.

I think a lot of men seek meaning and purpose through sport that it cannot deliver. Often they play to live out fantasies and aspirations their every day life cannot. Men have an unending urge to feel important and useful. Most every father, for example, exhibits this trait. I don't think there's anything wrong with that. What is wrong is when people can't accept the reality that they're not nearly as good as they'd like to think they are, that their dreams of playing for England or India or Manchester United are all a little daft, and they ought not vent their frustration at not being able to realise these aspirations on other people who don't share that dream. Most of all, sport is meant to be fun. It is fun precisely because it is pointless. It is not so fun when it becomes a focal point for the every day man's manhood. It saddens and worries me that many of the young men in my team measure their worth as men by how many wickets or runs or catches they accumulate. In that process they forget to simply enjoy themselves. Could this be a microcosm of a more general existential angst? Or was I standing at fine leg for too long?