Seconds that can last an eternity

27 January 2015 - 09:05 By Ross Tucker
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Doctor Know: Ross Tucker
Doctor Know: Ross Tucker
Image: Times Media Group

High-performance sport is punctuated by moments that interrupt a continuous thread. These moments provide ecstasy and agony for coaches, players and fans.

Call them "plot twists", these are the single events, infinitesimally small, that make or break matches, tournaments, and possibly careers.

They inspire all manner of futile questions and observations - what if? . if only . so near yet so far - and remind us just how small the differences between success and failure are.

Bafana Bafana's Africa Cup of Nations 2015 campaign has delivered its fair share of such moments - including a missed penalty against Algeria. Ninety minutes later, and what remains of the optimism that carried the team to Equatorial Guinea is a tiny glimmer of hope that we will beat Ghana tomorrow. How different it might have been.

Bafana's Afcon campaign reminds us of one of the great paradoxes in elite sport: that microscopically small events, sometimes lasting a single second in a match, can be as wide as the Grand Canyon to overcome. I've previously referred to the 0.5% concept that the difference between athletes who win Olympic gold medals and those who finish fourth is 0.5%.

Athletes whose life's ambition is Olympic success can achieve a final "examination" score of 99.5% and still leave with nothing. Half a percent ahead of them is the athlete who gains sporting immortality whereas they remain anonymous.

In that half a percent you'll find all those tiny moments, such as penalty misses, refereeing decisions and bounces of the ball. You might think this tiny difference means that going from anonymity to legendary is easy. You'd be wrong. The final tiny step towards glory can be the most difficult.

This is seen in men's tennis right now - in which, for over a decade, Roger Federer, Rafa Nadal, Novak Djokovic and Andy Murray have dominated, winning 36 of the last 40 grand slams.

Behind them is a swarm of players who lack something so small that it cannot be measured. You could allow a certain hopelessness to gather at this notion, a feeling that sporting outcomes are almost predestined, but that would be the wrong response. What should be drawn from these lessons is a renewed attitude to work and a sense of purpose.

First, it's important to realise that the first 99.5% is only half the job. Getting to being competitive, as Bafana have done, is the first step. Finishing and winning require doubling of the effort.

Don't despair, just work harder.

Second, given how many of these singularities exist, it can become crippling to focus too intensively on them. Great Britain's Olympic campaign gave us the concept of marginal gains, in which every investment was made to find and control factors adding up to success.

This is all good and well, but when you step back and look at the whole picture, realising just how many things happen beyond your control - a refereeing decision, for instance - there's a real danger of analysis paralysis.

The solution, and one hopes the SA Football Association and coach Shakes Mashaba are on the same page, is to cultivate realistic optimism, recognising that we're very close, but still very far. Then work hard at the vision and let the coach carry the players towards the shared purpose.

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