Dialogue: Heads up, chaps, it's only a game

By JOHN ROUGHAN

Anton Oliver walked from the Sydney stadium straight into an Australian television camera. He looked like a condemned man. It was a match, he muttered, they could have won.

Fair enough. Give him a moment.

A few minutes later, as speeches were made, the All Black captain was called to the podium. From my armchair I urged him on as fervently as at any time during the game:

"Do the right thing, Anton. Show them you are as good as I think you are."

Oliver has been a tonic to the culture of professional rugby this season. He gave a hint of it even before he was chosen to lead the All Blacks.

When the Highlanders lost a vital match late in the Super 12, it was clear in Oliver's after-match remarks that he was not at all interested in the fortunes of other teams which could still let his side into the finals. He dismissed all discussion of it. He simply did not want to qualify that way.

Anyone who heard him would not have been surprised a few weeks ago when he passed up a penalty kick for a bonus point in the last seconds of the Carisbrook test. It was absolutely in character and absolutely right.

It is a matter of pride, really. Oliver, like any talented sportsman, like an artist, like anyone who knows he can do something well, sets his own standards. Winning is important but it is not always enough.

Oliver would not give a dime for winning a series by a bonus point from a losing match. Winning for him means beating all the rest. If he cannot do it that way then, by his standards, he has not done it.

And he is prepared to operate by his standards, knowing they are not necessarily those of today's conventional wisdom. His exuberant after-match chatter this season has been a delightful change from the safe, 1990s niceness of Taine Randell and Todd Blackadder, and from the gruff formalities of most captains before them.

Listen to Oliver after beating the Springboks at Eden Park two weeks ago. Asked whether the victory was a statement to the critics, he said: "A statement to ourselves more than anyone. We're our own yardstick and it felt we didn't really fire a shot at Dunedin ... Tonight we made a statement to each other that we could do a bit more. We put a good performance in and kept the wolves at bay for another week."

And, for once, a rugby captain did make a pretence of regret at a scuffle. "It's a South Africa-All Black test. I'm not going to be PC about it," he said. "The whole crowd were loving it."

So when Oliver was called to the podium last Saturday, I dared hope this captain might show us something impressive in defeat. Despite the debacle in the lineouts, despite the agony of defending so furiously and letting the Wallabies across in the last seconds, I thought he would rise to the occasion.

Had he been playing a solo sport and speaking only for himself, I suspect he would have managed it. But obeying some terrible expectation of our rugby fraternity he went to the microphone, head down, half turned towards the retiring Wallaby captain John Eales, mumbled something about it being "your day" and walked away.

When did rugby in this country decide the only proper demeanour for a defeated team is be sore losers? It is an attitude that predates professionalism and goes much deeper than representative levels.

Some years ago I watched the final of the North Harbour senior club competition and happened to be standing near the teams at the presentation afterwards.

The losing players were a fascinating study. As they listened to the speeches their faces were quite normal until they caught the eye of a team-mate. Then their expression would change to a stormy mixture of abject woe and frustrated fury.

There was much shaking of heads and stamping of the ground and silent self-mortification. As they trooped away with their finalists' trophies, one former All Black dropped his in a rubbish drum.

If you are going to play serious sport you need a burning will to win, and to be burned up by failure is the other side of that coin.

"Fear of failure" became the catch phrase before the Sydney test. It is healthy, up to a point. It becomes thoroughly unhealthy at the point the whistle blows and it becomes impossible to face defeat with some sporting dignity.

New Zealand rugby was not always that way. It is hard to imagine captains Wilson Whineray, Brian Lochore or, more recently, Graham Mourie or David Kirk descending so deeply into misery that they could barely mutter a word.

And they did lose sometimes. They had a habit of losing every time they played a series in South Africa and it was agony. The folk memory of 1937, when the Springboks won a series here, ate into the national heart every time we failed to even the score.

Yet since John Hart, Sean Fitzpatrick and company finally laid that ghost in 1996, the national mortification over a loss has become much worse. We kid ourselves that it is good for the players, toughening their fibre by making them afraid to fail.

Fear is miserable fuel. People perform better for pride and the joy of doing well and the ability always to do better. And when they fail it is not a disaster. It is a game.