Sport as metaphor for life

In a provocative piece in Melbourne’s The Age, the columnist Tim Soutphommasane asserts that Australia’s current malaise on the cricket field “may also say something about the state of the nation… cricket as a metaphor for life.”

Has he not noticed that, while Europe and North America have struggled to get any semblance of forward motion, the economy in Australia has remained in robust health?

I'm always leary about sport/society metaphors. When I lived in Sydney in the early 1980s, Australia went crazy about their "historic" winning of the ultimate prize in sailing, the America's Cup. However, the strong feeling of euphoria accompanied a deep national slide into recession...

And the man behind the achievement, entrepreneur Alan Bond, was eventually sent to prison for fraud.

Now how do you decode all that, metaphorically?

Sport as catalyst?

All my life I’ve loved sport. As a child it engaged me fully and there were moments when I thought that I might become quite good at rugby or cricket or athletics.

I still love to watch sport, both on TV and in the flesh, especially when it is played well. And the final of the Euro 2012 football competition last night between Spain and Italy was outstanding in terms of the skills on show, the creativity of the players and the teamwork displayed.

Where I draw the line is when pundits suggest that winning the Olympics, or the World Cup, or the World Series, or whatever, will lift the morale of a nation or city in ways that will impact either the economic performance or the net quotient of happiness of the inhabitants. It doesn’t. Although politicians often pretend that it does (and consequently plough billions of our money behind massive schemes, when the resources could be so much more effectively targeted elsewhere).

The only exception to this in my lifetime is the way in which Barcelona planned and implemented a strategy to transform their city, with the Olympics as a keystone. (I wrote about this in the blogpost of 14 November 2011.)

But this is not going to happen with Spain winning last night’s competition. The country’s problems will be just as great today as they were yesterday. Nor, I sense, with London’s Olympic Games, now just a few weeks away.