There is power in accepting that you are rubbish - Matt Heath

Matt Heath officially accepts his cricket team is crap and should probably give up. Photo / 123RF

OPINION

Sometimes in life, there is power in accepting that you are rubbish. When you acknowledge you suck at a thing and always will, you free yourself to expend your energy in other, more productive endeavours.

Whether it’s mathematics, singing or baking, there are certain skills that will not line up with you as an entity.

In sixth-century BC, the Chinese Daoist sage Lao Tzu wrote, “To be wise is to have learned how one must sometimes surrender to the universe.” In his opinion, protesting against reality is a waste of time; it is better to accede to the truth and move forward.

With this in mind, I officially accept my cricket team is crap and should probably give up. The ACC XI (as we are known) are winless after five years of competition. There is a cliche in cricket that “catches win matches”. In our last game, against the Titans Dulux Tradies XI, we dropped every single catch that went up. Eleven in total. This may be a world record.

What was particularly hard to stomach in this match was that I sucked the most. There were four teams in this tournament, and I was easily the worst player at the Bay Oval in Tauranga that day. Ex-Black Cap James Marshall was commentating the game on a live feed and said this of my bowling: “Hahaha, this is not good. Hahaha, he’s bowling so slowly, if he followed through, he’d beat the ball to the other end. Hahaha.” I was no better in the field, dropping an absolute sitter at mid-wicket. Thankfully, I wasn’t called on to bat.

We should, of course, choose what we give up on carefully. Often, you can examine your failings and find a path toward improvement. Arguably, this is our purpose on the planet.

In work, as parents, as friends or citizens of this great country, we should all try to better ourselves in some way every day. As the saying goes, “Compare yourself not with others but the person you were yesterday.”

If you are tardy, you can work towards arriving on time. If you are easily angered, you might endeavour to take control of your temper. If you spend your evenings staring into your phone instead of engaging with your kids, you can work on fighting your damaging digital addiction.

Recently, I have been painting my house. I knew nothing about prepping when I started. I was useless. Today, I cut a perfect piece of scribing, placed it, nailed it up, sealed it up, sanded it down and painted it. I have improved at the art of house-painting massively over a mere nine weeks of hard work. This is the way.

But your goals have to be reasonable. A turtle can’t incrementally learn how to fly. No matter how much he wants it, he will still be earthbound. A dog can’t become a cat. This is the case with myself and the ACC XI. We suck so much that us playing a decent game of cricket is as likely as a shelled reptile growing wings and taking off.

A lot of this comes down to physical deterioration. During our most recent twenty-over match, seven members of our team, including myself, suffered painful injuries. These injuries all occurred in the mild act of jogging around the field.

Sledging normally happens between teams. You might use harsh words to put an opponent off his game. At one point, my own squad turned on me. They loudly dubbed me the hunchback of Notre Dame. The worst part of this insult was the truth of it. I have developed a somewhat Quasimodo-esque gait on the park.

Truth is also what we received from our captain G Lane. In a video that has now gone viral, you see him storm into the changing shed post-game and viciously take out his frustrations on the team. “Every single one of you is useless!” he screams, and then he points directly at me: “But you are f***ing hopeless.” He was right. Those were words that needed to be said, and I am okay with that.

There is power in knowing the areas in which you have no chance of improvement. My area is cricket.

Now, having accepted that truth, there is no need to train; I’ll put that energy into something else. Better still, I can’t be humiliated any further than I have been - there is nothing to lose, so I can’t wait to really suck again in our next match. Go the mighty ACC XI.