Denis Walsh: From Manchester City to the All Blacks, greatness can be hard to love

In sport, greatness has always been divisive. It isn’t like great movies or books or works of art that can be appreciated from a neutral space: in sport, somebody is always on the receiving end of greatness; belittled by it, or overwhelmed, or maybe humiliated. It doesn’t exist in a cool vacuum: there are always consequences that end up framing our response.

So, the great Manchester City team of the Pep Guardiola era are involved in far too many clinical, soporific matches, devoid of mystery or peer-to-peer competition. If you’re a fan of football but not Manchester City, you have the option to admire the technical brilliance and the tactical ingenuity, but it won’t change your heart rate or the sense sometimes that their games should be observed in a gallery, in appreciative silence. Is that how it should feel? Doesn’t matter.

You might think, as sports fans, that we should harbour unconditional feelings for greatness; instead, we equivocate about it. We wonder about the cost. To us. Manchester City have emasculated the Premier League, just as, not so long ago, Dublin had anaesthetised the football championship, and before that, Kilkenny had colonised the hurling world, and very soon their greatness became an intrusion; as fans, we wanted a variety of outcomes, and forgive our venality, we would have been happy to accept something less than greatness.

Greatness can be hard to love. Admiration has an established vocabulary, and we all know the words, but love is a different thing. Were Liverpool loved by neutrals while they towered over English football in the 1980s and 1990s? Manchester United under Alex Ferguson? The All Blacks? The New England Patriots? If you didn’t have an existing emotional involvement with any of those teams the chances are you didn’t love them for their greatness.

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[ Different story now for sectarianism and sport in Northern Ireland ]

Proximity is part of the equation, the extent to which their greatness threw shade on your team. I grew up as a Cork GAA supporter in the 1970s and 80s when Kerry had the greatest football team of the 20th century and Cork were extras in their summer blockbuster. Our annual attendance at the Munster football final was partly dutiful and partly delusional.

We never stayed until the end to acknowledge Kerry’s superiority; that kind of generosity was too outlandish to be entertained. If we couldn’t beat Kerry we could at least beat the traffic. Dad would lead us from our seats, landing some grenade about “the small ball” in the lap of the nearest Kerry follower. They didn’t care about our darling hurlers. We pretended indifference to their magical footballers.

Ultimately, these feelings can be corrosive. If you enter the words, “Why do fans hate the New England Patriots,” into a Google search, nearly 5.9 million results will appear on your screen in less than half a second. If you replace the Patriots with Manchester City, the figure is about 13.7 million in a little more than half a second. Even allowing for the fact that “hate” is one of the most ubiquitous words on the internet, the search results are another window into how conflicted we are about greatness in sport. Sometimes, we simply find it intolerable.

Why would anybody hate the New England Patriots? Set aside, just a second, their two high profile convictions for cheating, their Donald Trump supporting, sour-pussed, taciturn coach, Bill Belichick, and it comes down to the numbers: 17 AFC East titles in 19 seasons, during which time they reached nine Superbowls and won six of them. In the backwash of their dominance there were too many crushed victims for their greatness to be widely cherished. Instead, it was honoured and acknowledged through gritted teeth.

Have they become any more lovable since Tom Brady left and Belichick endured the first losing season of his 22-year reign? No. That’s not how it works. On the other side, nobody is there to break your fall.

Whatever you think about greatness, sport depends on emotional responses for its pulse. In that context, the most compelling narrative is still weakness and vulnerability, and how that battle plays out. Were the All Blacks more interesting when many of their opponents swooned at the sight of the jersey? Or are they more interesting now, since they’ve discovered ways to lose that they never knew existed and the veil of greatness has dropped? At the moment, you can’t take your eyes off them.

Was Tiger Woods a more interesting story during his 281 consecutive weeks at world number one, between 2005 and 2010, or was he a more compelling figure during the uncertain years that followed, when his private life, his body and his golf game all came asunder? It was nearly impossible to like Woods until fallibility became one of his defining qualities. The 2019 Masters will always be the greatest achievement of his career, in large part because greatness had long since left his game and he was fighting on a different front.

One other, rarely quoted, thing to note about certified greatness is its capacity to kill joy, even for those upon whom greatness is thrust. One image from the end of Kerry’s glory years under Mick O’Dwyer captures how the wonder can fade. As the final whistle blew in the 1986 All-Ireland final Jack O’Shea and Paidi O’Se stood quite close to one another. Kerry were champions for the third year in a row, their seventh title in nine years; Tyrone had built a threatening lead in the second half of that match, but Kerry had swatted them away with about 17 minutes of sustained excellence.

Among the Kerry players, though, there was no visible ecstasy in their moment of triumph. Jacko and Paidi didn’t embrace, or even shake hands; instead they sprinted in pursuit of the match ball. “When you already have seven medals,” wrote David Walsh in Magill magazine, “you come to Croke Park looking for something more on final day.” It is an unintended consequence.

Ballymacarbry won their 41st ladies football county championship in-a-row in Waterford last weekend, an astonishing feat. You can imagine how their incarcerated rivals feel about Ballymac’s greatness. No offence.