Harry Brook incident proves elite players cannot have it both ways: Brian Moore
THE FACTS
- England cricketer Harry Brook was involved in an incident with a bouncer at a bar in Wellington ahead of the Ashes tour.
- England were soundly beaten 4-1 by Australia in the Ashes series.
- The 1993 British & Irish Lions were beaten 37-24 by Otago in their first defeat of the tour.
It was a Friday lunchtime in Dunedin, the day before the British and Irish Lions played Otago on their 1993 tour of New Zealand. What started off as a civilised lunch for three turned into a prolonged session where we downed nine bottles of, admittedly good, New Zealand pinot noir. My fellow diners/drinkers were Wade Dooley and Peter Winterbottom. We didn’t plan any of it; it just happened.
In the light of this anecdote, what comes next might attract accusations of hypocrisy. It is not, for reasons I will set out.
Recent revelations from the Ashes tour have drawn focus on the subject of sport and drinking. Not just the modest consumption of alcohol, which does no real harm, but excessive imbibing, done at the wrong time. Rugby has long been associated with drinking and, at junior level, long may it continue because it is the source of fun and stories that people share for years. The problem comes in the world of elite sport.
For nearly all my career, I played as an amateur and one of the compensations for forgoing, as I did, all but two summer holidays in a 17-year career, was that tours abroad were taken seriously but there was some leeway in terms of downtime. Today is very different; players are well paid and sign contracts that have disrepute clauses and mandate certain standards of behaviour.
Back then nobody was a brand ambassador for a global product and there were no lucrative image-rights contracts, which depended on you having a clean image. The fact rugby, or a similar sport, is now an athlete’s job must make the social mores around it different. You cannot have it both ways: taking the money and justifying big salaries by claiming you are elite, then wanting the freedom to act like an ordinary person.
What has also changed is the omnipresence of recorded evidence. CCTV and cellphones mean almost nothing done in public is not recordable, and hence discoverable. Whether athletes like it or not, they are potentially in the public eye wherever they go and around the clock. Journalists are not the only reporters of events. The general public can now digitally or verbally report their observations globally by simply posting on social media, often with the sole motive of getting likes on their feed.
The recent Harry Brook incident, in which he was involved in an altercation with a nightclub bouncer, is similar to the dwarf-tossing that happened in Queenstown with England’s rugby players at the 2011 World Cup. Both were known about by management and dealt with internally, without any public announcement being made. The chances of either incident going unrecorded, and subsequently being publicly revealed, were almost nil.
The right way for management to deal with such events is to make their own announcement of what happened and to give details of the sanction made against those who strayed. Anything else will look evasive and, by the time the revelation comes, all control of the public agenda has been lost.
For players, it is simple: if you sign contracts and get paid, you have to keep certain standards of behaviour, whatever it was like for your predecessors. If you do not want the restrictions, you cannot take the cash.
And it does not just stop with that simple premise. We now have to consider the “optics”. What will going out drinking seem like to the public? I am not talking about the opinions of puritans who want to deny any relaxation, but those of the average fan who, by the way, is often paying for the big salaries. You can behave as you wish, but you cannot complain about the consequences if your actions are viewed unfavourably.
Today’s players are quick to remind players of my age that “the game has moved on”. They are partially right; techniques have changed but fundamentals have not. Furthermore, if the game has moved on, it has also done so in terms of preparation and the way in which stress is dealt with. No sports nutritionist recommends that going on a bender is good for preparation and no sports psychologist will tell you that excessive drinking is a good way to deal with stress.
Of course, this topic is, ultimately, subject to outcome bias. If you are winning or playing well, nothing is likely to be said. Going into the Otago game we were unbeaten; I wasn’t playing the next day and Wade and Wints both played well, with Wints being awarded player of the match, even in a losing cause. The same cannot be said of the likes of Brook’s Ashes performances.