The art of losing
To be a great winner, you need to have lost greatly first. Australia have shown how to respond to defeat; can crushed England follow suit?
Simon Barnes
20-Jul-2015
Australia bounced back spectacularly from their Cardiff low; now the ball is in England's court • Getty Images
Losing is the most underrated skill in sport - after all, you assume that anybody can do it. But mastery of the art of losing is what separates the champions from the rest. If you can't lose well, you'll never know ultimate victory.
Losing is part of sport. For just about every professional, losing is an unavoidable part of life. Sometimes defeat is frustratingly narrow: a couple of points, a few inches, a fraction of a second, a dropped catch, an unlucky bounce.
But sometimes defeat is so complete that you doubt the value of yourself as a human being: you feel invalidated, unmanned, unwomaned, humiliated, your pretensions stripped bare before the world. People go into a sport hoping to be heroes; they discover that much of the sporting life is about looking like a fool.
There are very few great performers who haven't tasted defeat of the most abject kind: who have never suffered personal humiliation and mockery, who haven't walked along the street wondering how many people look at them and feel contempt.
You need to be a good loser. Which is rather different from being happy about losing. You must learn to take the horrors of defeat and convert them into victory. No skill is more important in sport
You need to be a good loser. Which is rather different from being happy about losing. You must learn to take the horrors of defeat and convert them into victory. No skill is more important in sport. You're going to suffer defeat, but if defeat destroys you, you are lost.
Iain Dowie, when manager of Crystal Palace football club, claimed that his team had "great bouncebackability". The word has gained traction because it encapsulates sport's essential skill. You can lose. We all lose. What separates us is the way we respond. Do we bounce back like a cricket ball on a trampoline? Or like a dead cat?
The current Ashes series is about bouncebackability. That's now quite clear. First Australia and then England were asked if they possess this priceless asset. Both teams have suffered the sort of defeat that makes you question your reasons for existing on the planet.
Australia lost first, and it seemed that their entire tour was in disarray. They also lost the services of the fine bowler Ryan Harris, their wicketkeeper Brad Haddin looked past it, Shane Watson looked like a permanently promising never-wozzer.
Australia didn't bat very well, didn't bowl very well and didn't field very well. So they lost. In such circumstances a touring team will often unravel, bitching, blaming and sulking. Instead Australia came out at Lord's in the second Test, won the toss on a disgracefully batsman-friendly wicket - batsman-ingratiating, more like - and motored away with the match.
So that's how you deal with defeat. England will have taken note - and wondered if they have what it takes to do the same thing. Australia dropped Watson, Haddin was out with personal problems, and the replacements did really well.
So England have two things to think about. The first is strategy and with it, personnel. The second is individual and collective will. That is what is required to recover from a wounding defeat that exposes your every last weakness to the opposition and the world.
Some have it. Some don't. Let us examine the greatest current rivalry in women's tennis, between the No. 1-ranked player, Serena Williams, and the No. 2, Maria Sharapova. The head-to-head is 18-2 in Williams' favour; at Wimbledon a couple of weeks back, Williams beat Sharapova for the 17th consecutive time. It seems the lady's not for bouncing.
But here are a couple of players who knew all about bouncing back. Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova swapped the No. 1 ranking again and again: for 12 years (barring only 23 weeks) either one or the other was No. 1. Their final head-to-head was 43-37 in Navratilova's favour.
England have two things to think about. The first is strategy. The second is individual and collective will. That is what is required to recover from a wounding defeat that exposes your every last weakness
Here are two great athletes who knew how to lose. It's all in Nietzsche: that which doesn't kill us makes us stronger. If you can believe that, if you can put that into action as an individual and as a team, you'll be a champion.
Steve Redgrave is regarded as the embodiment of victory, as if winning was his defining characteristic. Redgrave is the British oarsman who won a gold medal at each of five successive Olympic Games: certainly he knows about winning. But he got there by losing. And he showed himself the best of all losers.
In his final Olympic year of 2000, Redgrave and his crew lost humiliatingly in a pre-Olympic event. Redgrave was by then 38 and diagnosed with diabetes. This was not an effortless progression from victory to victory. To win that historic fifth, Redgrave had to deal with defeat.
The England cricket team's test of bouncebackability is a very public business. In the days before the third Test begins at Edgbaston next week, their chances will be endlessly examined. It will be played out before us for five brutal days that will expose every character flaw that lurks behind the media training.
I'm inclined to be pessimistic. Being English. Even though England teams have bounced back before. Most famously of all, Ian Botham did it in 1981 at Headingley. In 2005, England turned round a first-match defeat with a quite extraordinary batting display on the first day of the second. And on the triumphant tour of 2010-11, England were close to defeat in the first Test before a famous fightback.
So it can be done. It needs someone to stand up and give a great performance, and the rest to rally round. But England don't need to be good losers. They need to be great losers. The best.
Simon Barnes is a former chief sportswriter of the Times and the author of more than 20 books