We're sledgers, not supporters

31 March 2016 - 02:17 By Darrel Bristow-Bovey

Now don't get me wrong, there's plenty wrong with the Proteas. Some of the problems involve bad luck and circumstance, some involve a selection panel who only have the courage of their worst convictions, some involve senior players going through the ugliest mid-life crisis since my Uncle Arthur left home to follow Taylor Swift's 1989 concert tour.Some of the problems involve the fuzziest logic and weirdest decision-making ever seen outside of a Batman v Superman plot synopsis.Why take Dale Steyn to a World Cup to bowl him for 12 balls? Why make AB prepare by opening on bouncy tracks then bat him at No5 in India against the West Indies? Why use your stash of kryptonite to make a spear, instead of, like, a thousand kryptonite machine-gun bullets?If one of the good guys has to kill the bad guy with the kryptonite spear, why not let Wonder Woman do it instead of Superman, since, you know, kryptonite doesn't harm her?But if it were up to me, there's one ingredient in the Proteas mix I'd replace first of all, even before the coach or finding a seamer who doesn't bowl leg-side wides like an octopus during a biometric test, trying not to bend its elbow.I'd replace the fans.Not all the fans, obviously: just the ones who make the most noise, the ones who have become so toxic that you wonder if they only watch to take a grim pleasure in failure.By the end of the third over against the West Indies last week, they were all over social media. "We're finished! We're rubbish!" Everyone must be fired! Eighteen balls into a format of cricket that can turn on you faster than a Nagpur curry, they were already worked up into a lather of self-righteous fury. It was as if there was a prize for being the first person to say we'd lost.I suggested on Twitter that maybe this abusive defeatism was premature. Oh, what a wave of ire. I was a denialist, a government stooge, a member of an Eastern Cape municipality. and so on.Imagine being 20 years old, prodigiously talented, already feared and respected by your international peers, having to play with a bunch of jerks like that as your home support. Imagine being the best batsman in the world, enduring a brief slump in form, knowing these are the voices from home trying to get into your head.The match went the distance and when the last over started we could still win. Did this get these twits to temper their virulence? No. Back they came , crowing, "I told you so!" What kind of person sneers triumphantly when his own team loses? It's weird to find yourself hoping your team wins just to shut up your fellow fans.It's hard not to see this as part of a wider context: it's as though these self-contorting boo-boys are trying to talk themselves out of their own affiliations and opportunities for connection, turning on the things that could still give them pleasure if they'd only let them. It's a shame.The future is scary, and when you're afraid of the future it's hard to love, but if you don't watch sport for love, why watch at all?..

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