I’ve been watching Team Canada falter a bit during the preliminary round of the Men’s Ice Hockey tournament at the 2010 Winter Olympic Games. Many pundits have reasoned that it is due to the heavy weight of expectations laid on the team. That got me thinking about the similarities between Canada and England. Canada is to ice hockey, what England is to soccer. They are both credited with creating their respective sports and are therefore expected to show their dominance by winning every major tournament they enter. I’ve always thought that the English soccer fans, much like the Canadian hockey fans, put too much pressure on their national team and that it inevitably has an adverse effect on their performance. Am I right? When teams placed in such situations lose, is it because they succumbed to the pressure of unrealistic expectations or is it because they simply weren’t good enough?
England simply aren’t up to it. They last won the World Cup in the 60’s and seem to falter at the first sign of adversity in the mid to later rounds. The world has caught up in footballing terms and more nations are capable of winning the World Cup.
The English press are notorious for hype. It’s how they sell papers. But it creates insanely high expectations. That can’t be easy on the team. But as they say, that’s why they get paid the big bucks.
Maybe the other team is just better, not necessarily that the Canadian team succumbed to pressure. It was someone else’s turn to win!
Play hard!