The thankless job of fielding

At the 2011 Under-20 football World Cup in Colombia, England were dour and dogged and made it through to the second round by drawing all three of their group games 0-0, for which they were generally hammered by people back home.

I was one of two English print journalists in Colombia for the tournament. There's always a danger when you're close to a story that you come to sympathise with the protagonists, but here I think the sympathy was justified. Fully, 36 players had been denied to the coach Brian Eastick by the clubs and a further injury crisis had him scrabbling to get any kind of coherent tactical system together. Add in the unfamiliar conditions - most notably the extreme humidity in Cartagena - and those three draws came to seem vaguely heroic.

Writing a piece explaining that led to a general discussion of what football should be and whether teams have a duty to entertain. For the record, I think not: they have a duty to try to get the best result they can within the laws of the game (and whatever their interpretation is of the spirit of those laws) and it is in that that the intrigue of sport lies. But more intriguing was what it revealed to me of why I like football and why the instant gratification of basketball, say, leaves me cold.

I like the fact that goals are rare, partly because that seems to permit lesser teams to win just often enough to ensure matches bear the "right" level of unpredictability, and partly because it means what we remember are positives. What is decisive in football is a goal, which is the point of the game. When we remember great games of the past, we remember the goals that decided them.

Basketball's apologists argue that nothing happens in football, but the paradox of having so many baskets scored is surely that they cease to mean anything. It is as though football were a perpetual penalty shoot-out; the misses register more than the goals. And that seems to add a very negative edge to the experience: how can fans possibly enjoy a basket being scored when there's likely to be another one coming along for the other side ten or 20 seconds later?

Pondering this last week, it occurred to me that there is an in-built negativity in the culture of much US sport. In Chad Harbach's The Art of Fielding, for instance, the baseball player Henry Skrimshander is haunted by an error that breaks his streak of faultless games at short-stop. An "E" goes up next to his name on the scoreboard and he suffers an almost total breakdown as a result. The oddity about that is that runs are relatively rare in baseball; rare enough, anyway, that you would think the focus would, as in football, be on them rather than the fielding side.

Which brought me to cricket. Given I had decided I preferred sports in which the points scoring was limited, how could I square cricket with that? And the simple answer is that I can't. Even the day after witnessing a great innings, how many shots do you actually recall?

I have a vague sense of Kevin Pietersen's sixes against Brett Lee at The Oval in 2005, or of a couple of Ian Botham's strokes against Australia in 1981, but even then the memory was blurred by having seen too many balls carted over square leg or too many muscular crunches through the off side. What you're left with is a flavour of an innings. It's the same with wickets: we may remember a brilliant catch - Paul Collingwood against Matthew Hayden at Bristol in 2005 or Mark Ramprakash against Jeffrey Dujon at Headingley in 1991 - or the wicket that ended a great game - Bob Willis bowling Ray Bright at Headingley in 1981 or Geraint Jones catching Michael Kasprowicz at Edgbaston in 2005, but great spells of bowling again tend to leave a flavour rather than specifics.

But still, the emphasis is on the positive. Because we don't - yet - collate detailed stats on fielding, we have no real idea of how often a fielder fumbles or drops a catch. Even a wicketkeeper who had taken 99 catches in a row wouldn't endure the sort of pressure and public humiliation Skrimshander suffered with his misfield; there would be no "E" next to his name on the scoreboard.

Unless, of course, there was a culture of bullying in the team, in which case a dropped catch can become a terrible burden. And that, really, is the oddest aspect of Pietersen's allegations about the conduct of certain England bowlers recently: there is no logic to hammering a team-mate for dropping a catch. If a fielder has let his concentration slip, or if he hasn't chased hard enough, or if he has chickened out of getting his body in the way, then of course criticising him is fair enough, but - the influence of dodgy bookies aside - nobody drops a catch on purpose: shouting at them is going to make them less likely to catch it next time, given the extent to which catching is rooted in confidence.

I spoke at the Cheltenham Literary Festival about cricket last week and was asked, given I am clearly pretty dreadful at cricket, why I was prepared to give up hours each week to play it. In part, of course, it is just to get away from work, but there is an enjoyment there that had gone from my hockey the previous season. And the reason for that, I realise, is precisely this point about whether the outlook of the game is positive or negative.

Perhaps largely because I am so bad, I tend to remember the good things as they are the more unusual. It is easy to ignore the soft dismissals and the leg-stump full tosses because they are the routine: what sticks in the mind is the two plunging catches at backward point. Playing hockey, though, as a defender, I used to leave games regularly in a fury if I had let my man get away from me to score, or if I had misplaced a pass or committed a foul that led to a goal: the interceptions, the good marking, the clean tackles were forgotten.

But just because the hockey had become wearying, just because I had started making more mistakes, that doesn't invalidate the art of defending. Quite the reverse. Which, after all, is the more heroic, to chase the glory of goals knowing mistakes will be forgotten, or to perform the unglamorous job diligently, knowing mistakes will be highlighted? That's why there can seem something thankless about fielding, and why it is vital for everybody involved, spectators, journalists and players, to remember how difficult clean sheets and unblemished records are to achieve, how hard it is not to make mistakes.