There's nothing wrong with supporting your team, and getting excited about some scintillating sporting action, but there are limits to it all. After all, New Zealand seemed to have a limitless supply of grief and empathy to share in the wake of the Christchurch mosque attacks, but it swiftly ran out when people started suggesting that sport doesn't really fucking matter.
Sport certainly does matter, to a lot of people. It's very, very important to them, because they have their identity and sense of worth wrapped up in the sport they follow. It can be somebody's entire life, or just something to watch at the pub on a Saturday night, but most people are genuinely interested in the sports results to some degree.
And as we've seen in the cricket, sport is full of stories of courage and resilience and last-minute efforts, and while nerds might complain about it leading the news sometimes, the reporting on sport is a great and vital thing, offering illumination and entertainment as much as any other part of the news media.
This coverage is an essential part of the news diet, and a crucial offset to the doom and gloom of regular reporting. (If you're just consuming the court stories and road toll, you'll have a pretty fucking grim view of the world.)
And this goes right down to grass-root levels, and Stuff's fairly recent destruction of sports reporting at the district level is a goddamn tragedy, because the great story of sport is more than corporate interests and professional perfection, it's the mums and dads who are out there every bloody week to support their kids on the field, and cheer on their neighbours at representational games. They're the people that you need to be connecting with.
And ultimately, away from the individual stats and stories, sport is just a great big metaphor for everything, for humanity's struggles and the individual's opportunity to shine, of the importance of teamwork and the value of community, and all that can be genuinely inspirational stuff.
But it's still just a fucking metaphor. It's not life, and there are always more important things to be worried about.
If, say, a sports player uses the wide platform given to them by their physical talents to spew out mental fuckheadery, with their narrow-minded ideology not even giving them the chance to see the harm they might be causing, they can expect to be called a fucking idiot, and nobody gives a flying fuck how well they run with a ball.
And if the local premier rugby team in the city where the mosque atrocities happened is named after ancient groups of Christian arseholes who specifically went out into the world to slaughter as many Muslims as possible, maybe it is worth having a goddamn discussion about that bloody name.
Anybody who wants to argue that the Crusades were hundreds of years ago, and so are not very relevant, can be ignored as a simpleton who doesn't have any sense of history or culture or society, and is actively ignoring the fact that no shithead is going to name a huge professional sports team The Nazis for at least a thousand years.
There's not much else to argue here - the Crusaders name has served the franchise well, but it's a valued history that only goes back to the start of the professional era, so there's no case for a legacy argument.
On the other hand, it's easy to argue for a name change while still supporting your local team, because it's easy to have a sense of priorities, and realise that that name now sends a horrific message to people in your own community who have been brutally attacked.
And it wouldn't diminish the legacy of a team that were one of the very best professional sports teams in the world - it won't undermine the great things achieved by men like Blackadder, McCaw, Carter, Mehrtens and so many more. Those records stand for all time, even if it's under a name that might not exist anymore
The Crusaders rugby team could had a chance to send a message to the world, that they can change with the times, even if iditotic polls argue for the status quo (the fears of the minority should never, ever be dictated by the mob), but decided to put it off with a cowardly promise to look at the issue next year. Or the next. Sometime.
(Maybe they still will, but it's as unlikely as England cricket declaring that the Black Caps should be co-champions - that might sense a message of insanely good sportmanship, which is unthinkable in today's winner-takes-all culture.)
The decision to put it off deciding on the Crusaders' future might have pleased the most pin-headed of their supporters, who can toast the move with their shit local beer, but they've shown the world that the deep and nasty racism that has always lurked in the shadow of the Port Hills hasn't gone fucking anywhere.
Just change the fucking name.
So yeah, it's okay to cheer on the Black Caps in their improbable bid for the world championship, and okay to feel a bit robbed by that bullshit boundary rule and the fact that some batsmen are now apparently allowed to hit the ball twice, and it was worth the saturation coverage, because this country always judges ourselves by how we deal with failure.
But it's also important to remember that it really is just a bunch of grown adults chasing a ball around a field, and that while it's some heavy fucking symbolism, it's still just symbolism. Real life is always more important.
- Steve Lombard
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