Yes, but it happens elsewhere too. Hell, there are a lot of American sports journalists and talking heads pulling the sportsmanship card here, either by ignoring how the rules of the World Championships work or thinking that not hurting opponents’ feelings too much should have more importance than putting the team in the game. best position to win, again, at world Cup.
Tangent: I’ve played many sports in my life, including college football (American football), and talk of “stepping up” is a strange fascination for me. Invariably, in a random high school or Division 3 football game, a high-level team beats a low-level team like 69-0 and the “sportsmanship police” come out to teach the lesson. When you read the box score, sometimes you’ll even see that the team pulled its starters in the second quarter, didn’t throw a pass after halftime, and the last five touchdowns were scored by the third and fourth players… but do it. has the sportsmanship police ever bothered to learn such details? No!
Hell, since I can’t resist a little Uncle Rico-ing, my alma mater won the state championship in 2012 with a team led by a current NFL player and a slew of “really good high school players » who were snooping around small universities. like me (we’re a small public school, so it’s not on the level of the “Texas teams that have eight guys with Division 1 offers” you’ll see on TV). Midway through the season, they faced our league’s perennial bottom feeder, a team that went 0-9 and wasn’t even close to competing with the second-worst team in the league. My alma mater won 70-13. They threw a total of five passes in the game; the starters were offside in the second quarter; no starting running back had more than four carries; at the end of the game, fourteen different players had carried the ball (on a team of 35 guys, so that’s pretty much every healthy running back/receiver on the roster); eight different players scored touchdowns; At the end they were about to have the waterboy and cheerleaders perform. The local sports reporter, to his credit, is a very nice guy who knows all the coaches (of all the teams in the area) well and has been pretty reasonable about the whole thing, but some of the local jerks didn’t couldn’t help but leave nasty comments on the newspaper article about how the good team was so mean to score 70 points against such a helpless opponent. The only way it could have been less would be a) not even sending the starters to the game or b) just leaving the field – taking a knee or punting on first down – which is all two much more embarrassing (IMO) than what actually happened.
TL;DR, a lot of times people who brag about running up the score aren’t actually looking at the bigger picture, they just see a big number and think the winning team showed unsportsmanlike spirit for the ‘have done.
EDIT: Here’s a good example from Division III football. St. John’s (MN), a perennial power, defeated St. Scholastica 98-0 in the season opener last year. Crime against sportsmanship, right? But then you read the box score:
Fourteen different guys carried the ball, ten different guys caught a pass, three different guys played QB. SJU didn’t try to get it started, but CSS couldn’t stop the second, third, fourth or fifth spars. The only way to reduce the score is even more embarrassing: either just start kneeling or end the game.
