It is the sneering rather than the missed penalties which have stayed in my mind after the England football team was knocked out of the Euro 2012 championships. The headlines have all been about racist attacks on the failed penalty-takers, both of whom happened to be black, but it is the weary cynicism of the football commentariat which is more revealing, and more pernicious.<\/p>\n
There is something distinctively English about our indulgence in what Thomas Aquinas called delectatio morosa<\/em> \u2013 morose delectation or pleasure derived from the misfortunes of others. \u201cRejoice not when thine enemy falleth, and let not thine heart be glad when he stumbleth,\u201d as the book of Proverbs puts it. In the Summa Theologica<\/em> the Angelic Doctor insists that \u201cthe habit of dwelling with enjoyment on evil thoughts\u201d is a sin.<\/p>\n Footballer commentators, however, do not reserve this vice for their pondering on opponents but direct it very much at their own side. Perhaps the worst is the BBC\u2019s Mark Lawrenson who, throughout the tournament, minimised every English achievement and seized with peevish glee on every fault. This went far beyond objective analysis. \u201cTypical England,\u201d was his refrain at he constantly ran the team down.<\/p>\n To judge from Twitter that sentiment was common among many at-home supporters whose physical prowess is limited to the ability to slump further back in their sofa and reach for another beer.\u00a0Even one of those decrying the racist abuse against penalty-missers Ashley Young and Ashley Cole opined that: \u201cthey should never have abused them for being black \u2013 they should have abused them for being useless!\u201d. This is the hyperbole of common speech but theologically no person is without use.<\/p>\n Of course this is not a universal reaction. Many people shared the response that, though England didn\u2019t play skilfully enough to secure victory in the quarter-final, it was impossible to fault their leonine effort. \u201cEveryone has given everything they\u2019ve got and that\u2019s all you can ask for,\u201d said the captain, Steven Gerrard. There was defeat but no dishonour. As the prime minister put it: \u201cEngland showed a lot of heart, and a lot of spirit and a lot of dogged determination\u201d. The players had \u201cmade the country proud\u201d.<\/p>\n The Germans have the word Schadenfreude for the taking of pleasure in the misfortune of others. A few years back an academic study was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology <\/em>on the reaction of German football fans and their Dutch and Italian rivals after a similar match. \u00a0It, like other academic studies, suggested that Schadenfreude \u2013 a more common response by far among men than women \u2013 is increased by two things: a sense of inferiority and feelings of envy. People with low self-esteem are more likely to feel Schadenfreude than individuals who have high self-esteem. In brain scans the magnitude of Schadenfreude could even be predicted from the strength of the previous envy response.<\/p>\n Perhaps Mark Lawrenson is in unconscious mourning for his long-departed glory days as a defender for Liverpool FC in its faded prime, and that is why he derives pleasure from sniping at the efforts of his successors. But the medieval theologians have something else pertinent to suggest. Morose delectation, which they thought was more about dark sexual brooding than football, was distinct from actual sexual desire, they insisted. It involves complacent fantasising, without any attempt to suppress such thoughts.<\/p>\n Schadenfreude is a modish word; English has a plainer term for this kind of malicious delight. We call it gloating and it is the mirror image of sympathy, pity or compassion. The BBC would do well to tell its commentators that for a public service broadcaster sympathetic analysis is to be preferred to smirking scorn.<\/p>\n \n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It is the sneering rather than the missed penalties which have stayed in my mind after the England football team was knocked out of the Euro 2012 championships. The headlines have all been about racist attacks on the failed penalty-takers, both of whom happened to be black, but it is the weary cynicism of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[3,81,329,716],"class_list":["post-5698","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-society","tag-bbc","tag-football","tag-racism","tag-society"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5698","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5698"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5698\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5718,"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5698\/revisions\/5718"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5698"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5698"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5698"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}