Dickens of an affair

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us ."

Charles Dickens wasn't talking about Springbok (or English) rugby. But he could have been. Or he could have been talking about a typical weekend in sport when he wrote A Tale of Two Cities. A tale of two countries, and of their fans, too.

In sport, memories are short, and passions run high. Just this weekend Stephen Jones, one of the leading rugby correspondents in England wrote, and I quote: "All the southern hemisphere nations should be worried. We in Europe are under no compulsion to grant them fixtures, and after this autumn it could just be that proud European teams decide they are hardly worth playing."

Indeed. Having won nine out of 15 matches in this recent autumn series, those proud Europeans could decide that it's not worth playing any of the teams who made up the entire semifinal lineup at the last Rugby World Cup, only 13 months ago.

At that time the southern hemisphere teams might have decided that it was hardly worth playing the Europeans.

The Six Nations, it was said, was a competition to identify the fifth-best team in the world. Now, they should consider playing among themselves, according to one journalist.

How things change. This is one of sport's greatest appeals. The narrative of resurgence and revival, and, by implication,decline (for sport is a zero sum game - when one team rises, another must fall) is what keeps scribes in business and fans enthralled.

England, now on a 14-match winning streak, currently sit near the top of the Ferris wheel, enjoying their time of Light and Hope. The Springboks sit near the bottom, in a season of Darkness and Despair, relatively speaking.

The point is that emotion punctuates and colours our interpretation of reality.

It causes an experienced journalist to conveniently erase recent history, to generalise and get carried away in the joy of the moment.

The flipside is that when a team is performing poorly, over-reactions are coloured by passion, too. We've seen a good deal of this in recent times in the South African media.

One enabler to this is the total removal of barriers to opinion, thanks to the internet.

Facts are not so much fluid as they are shifting between the liquid and vapour state, non-existent and often plucked out of thin air for the sake of a knee-jerk opinion piece disguised as analysis and insight.

I'm sure the term originated elsewhere, but Irish journalist David Walsh once called the cycling media "fans with typewriters", so blinded were they by the narrative that they became enablers of that sport's doping problem.

I sometimes wonder whether we're in danger of doing that with South African rugby.

This is a generalisation, but only a few of the "opinion leaders" in our media actually have the access and knowledge with which to offer insight on some of the things they speak of.

Our transformation and high performance challenge is one such example. The fan who has an opinion over a beer and a braai on a Saturday afternoon is wonderful, and it makes sport what it is . Without such "relatability" sport would die a rapid death - but I think it's problematic when a complex subject like that one is presented by that fan with beer in hand, but who is now sitting at his laptop.

Giving voices to everyone is sport's most valuable attribute. Perhaps this should be a call to value that voice and not to simply become a reflection of the pervading mood, telling people what they want to hear, creating frenzied ignorance by pandering to passion.

That's how Trump won an election and sport's "media" must aspire to be a little better than that.