The whipping boys
realfooty.theage.com.au
June 20, 2004
Every AFL club seems to have players who bear the brunt of supporter expectations. But who are these scapegoats, and why are they the ones who cop the flak? Nabila Ahmed reports.
He is the talented player with the laconic style. Or the big tall bloke with lead in his boots. Maybe even the fourth-year footballer who has never quite recaptured the magic of his debut season. Or the freak of nature who might win you a game off his own boot one week and miss a shot that even you could have kicked the next.
The one you think is soft, a bit suspect in the heart department and overpaid. You know the one. Every club has one: the player the fans love to hate. A player from their own team, that is.
So, what is it about a Joel Bowden or a Ben Graham that makes grown men want to tear their hair out? The men themselves, apparently, and their unrealistic expectations, according to sports psychologist Peter Kremer, who works with Richmond and the Victorian cricket team.
"We all go around with certain expectations of how things should be and if something is contrary to what we expect the world to be, then we start to develop a negative perception. Then we come to reinforce that perception and ignore evidence that's contrary to our negative perception," Kremer said.
"But it's really the perceiver that has the error rather than the player. The error really lies with the spectator. Once people have a notion that a player is of a certain style, our biases just kick in. You start to look for evidence that supports and firms that perception, and discount and undervalue any information that might be contrary to our perception, and that's just a fundamental human bias."
Kremer says fans' favourite whipping boys tend to be players in the middle stages of their careers - people who have been around a bit longer and been exposed a bit more often.
One man who knows how it feels to be exposed to such taunts is former Geelong forward, the "much-maligned" David Mensch. He has his own theories. "At Geelong it's been the bigger and slower players that have copped it, I reckon.
I suppose because my name rhymes with bench, they always said 'Mensch, bench'. I just think that because I was probably not the quickest player as well, I copped a bit of flak. I suppose Benny Graham has sort of taken my mantle. We're both local boys, so maybe that has something to do with it," he said.
One of the biggest scapegoats in West Coast's short history, Karl Langdon, is willing to concede some of the heckling he copped in his time with the Eagles was driven by his own form.
"They used to call me "nearly", because I nearly took a mark or I nearly kicked a goal," he said. "But they probably had every right to. If I was actually taking those marks and kicking those goals, they wouldn't have been calling me "nearly", would they?"
But while inconsistency is an obvious reason for players to fall out of favour with their fans, another underpinning aspect of the "scapegoat culture" is envy, says Jeff Bond, sport psychologist, director of Lane4 Management Group and Richmond fan.
"The envy of talent is part of the tallpoppy syndrome. Here's a guy who is so talented, he can do so many great things, why isn't he doing it?
"There is a percentage of the crowd that is past players or would-be players who think 'if I had his capacities, just think, I could be a hero out there'. So, they take it out on him: 'why, why is the club paying him so much money when he's not producing as he's meant to?' Someone like Matthew Richardson can often fall into this category."
The "envy" explanation is perhaps closely linked with another explanation: that people go to the football to not only be entertained but see it as an outlet for the frustrations of their daily lives, an escape from the grind of their nine-to-five lives. "People come to the football and vent what they can't from Monday to Friday with their bosses," says Greg Miller, football director at Richmond.
Former Essendon and Hawthorn star Paul Salmon, though, believes it is a case of just not understanding what it means to be a professional footballer. Salmon, who does not see himself as a "maligned" player but was devastated to be booed off Waverley Park at the end of his first stint with Essendon, in 1995, remembers what his coach Kevin Sheedy told him that day.
"Sheeds sat down with me after that game at Waverley and said 'just remember, supporters don't understand'. So I, from that moment forward, stopped even trying to make them understand what I was going through to put myself out there on the park, and it became irrelevant what anyone thought about my football from that point forward. It was a very cleansing experience," he recalled this week.
Salmon says he was not affected by the reception from Bomber fans, but admits to having felt at peace when he was hailed by those same supporters upon his return to the club seven years later.
"I didn't come back for the supporters, it wasn't about them, it was about some good friends of mine who convinced me they needed help. But I think the year certainly was – I never anticipated it would be a year of healing – but I think there was a degree of that for both myself and an element of the fans.
"It ended up being a beautiful way to finish my career at Essendon, the way I always hoped and every player would hope their career finished."
But redemption in the eyes of the fans is rare, not least because of the effect constant jeering may have on a player, says Bond.
"It's got to be very traumatic. Sometimes it will steel them to work harder but other times, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy to the point where they might be thinking 'I better not do whatever it is in case I play another shocker' and that can be very cruel," he says.
The other reason is that people's minds, once made up, are nearly impossible to change because, as human beings, we start to pigeonhole things and categorise things as quickly as we can because we have a limited processing capacity.
Once we categorise someone and start to believe something, says Kremer, "we trenchantly hold on to that view no matter what might be happening in front of us on the football ground in terms of the player's behaviour being contrary to our view".
In other words, if Joel Bowden goes out and kicks eight goals next weekend, chances are supporters would write that off as a "lucky day" or a "fluke" and continue on their merry, sledging ways.
As Salmon says, "it comes back to that dirty word: expectation."
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