The Art of Defeat
February, then. The shortest month of the year but one in which a maelstrom of football is whipped up and dispatched in the blink of an eye. Seasons end in days, not weeks. Rest days are few and far between.
Here’s what February looks like for my team. Home matches: 11th, 14th, 18th, 21st, 28th. Away matches: 4th, 25th.
Does that sound like too much football? Be thankful you’re not the programme editor.
The Art of Defeat
Bank Holiday Monday, August 2022. The football team I support, Coventry Sphinx, concede a goal in the first minute against Rothwell Corinthians in the catchily titled Uhlsport United Counties League Premier Division South. They lose 1-0, a result eased only by my high regard for Corinths and the fact that they deserved it on the day.
A penalty shoot-out in the League Cup notwithstanding, Sphinx then didn’t taste defeat again until 4th February 2023, winning sixteen of their eighteen matches in between. The draws were against Newport Pagnell Town in the league and Sleaford Town in the aforementioned cup tie. It has been quite the season.
As much as I also have time for Newport Pagnell, whom you might recognise as the current holders of the FA Vase and indeed now quarter-finalists this year, losing to them after a run of ten consecutive wins was grim. It hurt. It stung. So tight is the division that it was also damaging. The manner of the loss was even more of a gutshot.
It’s unreasonable to expect a team to maintain perfection. With Rugby Town close to it above them, and teams in good form below, Sphinx had no margin for error. That’s been the case all season and the 2-1 loss at Willen Road was the horrible yet inevitable moment when shit got real. I didn’t like it one bit.
But losing is the point of football. Or, rather, the possibility of losing – and winning – is the point of football.
Losing makes winning matter. Without a loser there can be no winner. Without losing there can be no winning. It sounds like loser talk but I've never felt envious of people who support football teams that win all the time.
I live and breathe every win but I truly wouldn't want to swap places with them. It seems to me that it's the rest of us that are the lucky ones, fully soaking up every victory while they take winning for granted and feel only defeat.
Probably. I don't actually know and I don't want to know. Losing is part of the experience. It's the sport. It's the secret sauce. It's an essential part of the magic.
Losing at the end of a long unbeaten run is relatively new territory for me as a supporter. I support Coventry Sphinx, not Arsenal's invincibles. It doesn't happen.
It bears repeating, as I return to Newport Pagnell Town 2-1 Coventry Sphinx, that I hated it. It sucked and blew at the same time. It stank. Even the positives were negatives, each more frustratingly fruitless than the last.
Yet it's been oddly liberating. This isn't a few games we're talking about; it had been months. Sphinx's unbeaten streak stretched back almost to the beginning of the season and, well, one can get a little preoccupied by that.
I'm not a superstitious supporter but months can skew the thinking and it only gets worse. Losing brought to an end months of wearing the same black rubber ear tunnels, of consciously making sure socks go on in the right order – all four pairs, for much of the winter – and of mentally cross-checking everything I'm wearing against its risk of causing the season to hit the skids.
At a certain point it escapes from the perimeter of matchday and one morning you're putting the left sock on before the right and then taking it off to start over, as if getting dressed for work wrong on a Wednesday is going to make your team lose on a Saturday.
It was ridiculous. Now I'm free from the oppression of my own stupidity. I’ve even allowed myself a change of underpants but the condition of my wafty old lucky bloomers isn’t really the point.
Losing is so central to the football experience that most of us are able to take it in stride, at least to a degree. Losing well is important. It reveals much about a person and their outlook on football that they’re able to look upon a defeat and appreciate that the other team got the job done.
Sometimes a loss is unfair. We’ve all felt the searing anger of injustice, the bone-rattling fury that only utter helplessness can fuel. Sometimes your team gets stiffed by forces both celestial and corporeal and there’s not a thing you can do about it. Hell, I’m not exactly chuffed with how Sphinx’s loss came about.
As a rational human being it’s helpful to balance reason with emotion. For every pissed off loser there’s a winner. Newport Pagnell handled their business and we didn’t. They’re a terrific side at our level – punchy, capable and bloody difficult to beat. On to the next one.
It’s a matter of mindset. Over the years, I’ve seen a lot of losses. I’ve also met many people who support and volunteer for other clubs, who are very much like me, and who see football in a similar way. There should be no enmity. It’s a game, after all, and one of our teams is going to get the shitty end of the stick. So what?
Some matches are bigger than others but that lack of genuine animosity – to be clear, it’s taken me the best part of four decades to get my head around that so I’m not claiming to be some sort of cherub – eventually starts to take the edge off defeat.
Going to football matches without comprehending that victory isn’t the only possible outcome is stupid in the extreme, not to mention antithetical to the entire point of being there in the first place.
Even the most heart-breaking defeats are mostly kept in perspective now. I don’t let them ruin the week or the weekend. Usually, I’m able to not take them home at all. That’s the bud from which the flower of good losery grows. It lets me see being beaten for what it really is: the result of a match that involved another team who also wanted to win.
It allows for a gracious reaction, for an authentic handshake of congratulations. For an appreciative nod in the direction of Newport Pagnell Town or a heartfelt message of goodwill for West Didsbury & Chorlton, by whom Sphinx were knocked out of the FA Vase on penalties a week later.
The visit of the South Manchester club to Coventry was the most gutting loss of the season but also an affirming reminder that non-league football supporters are generally a pretty decent sort.
Their hundreds of supporters made a racket but not a peep of it was aimed at us or our players. They simply got behind their team. They celebrated loud and long with their players after the shoot-out but not one of them strayed into goading. Winning well is important too and West Didsbury & Chorlton set an impressive example.
There will be people reading this who see this as a loser’s attitude. It’s not that I enjoy losing. To be at peace with defeat is to embrace everything football is as a sport, to understand it as a uniting force rather than yet another excuse to regress into neanderthal tribalism.
It’s not really the beautiful game if winning is the minimum expectation and losing is the only source of emotion. If that sounds familiar, I urge you to make that shift in your outlook. In football, as in life, you have to leave yourself somewhere to go.
“The independent commission which will consider the charges could recommend that City be expelled from competition, suspended or docked points if it finds the club guilty. Those sanctions are listed in the Premier League’s handbook but a commission is clear to apply any punishment it considers appropriate.”
City Football Group’s Manchester branch is in the brown stuff.
Salty beef extracts
‘Alternative reality’: European Super League’s new vision greeted with scorn (The Guardian)
Valencia: Former La Liga winners and Champions League finalists in turmoil (BBC Sport)
Non-League Nights (Kult)
The Match: Inter Milan 1-0 AC Milan (Sphinx Football)
Goal of the Week
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