Tag Archives: officials

Nalbandian: player behaviour in the spotlight again

June 19, 2012 By in Shumpty Speaks Tags: , , 2 Comments

Well it did not take long for another incident of player behaviour to be plastered across the airwaves and YouTube.  The David Nalbandian kick at the Queens Club Tournament on Monday (Australian time) was nothing short of woeful.  I do not wish to recount the events that lead to Nalbandian’s default: they have been dealt with enough in the media, both the mainstream and the blogosphere.

There are two things that I do want to comment on:

  1. Nalbandian’s “apology”; and
  2. Whether the likely penalty both fits the crime and is a big enough deterrent.

“Apology”

I use the word “apology” here loosely because, as seems to be the case with many sports people having been caught doing something wrong, the apology that followed the event is generally actually not one.  I have re-watched Nalbandian’s comments during the presentation at Queens and in the presser after and throughout it struck me that the occasions at which an apology was sought to be made by Nalbandian those attempts just looked insincere and, frankly, staged.

More to the point however, even if the “apology” was a genuine one, it was tarnished by Nalbandian’s vociferous attack on officials.  Unfortunately, this approach seems have become par for the course for sports people faced with an enquiry into their own conduct.  At a time when showing some humility and accepting ones fault, sports people now just seem to deflect fault.

The Penalty

Setting aside the police investigation that is presently underway, it looks likely that the penalties that Nalbandian is likely to suffer as a result of his misconduct will be limited to a pecuniary penalty of $72,000 made up of the prize money he has forfeited and a fine. 

How is that possibly a deterrent? He has won over $10 million in prize money on the tour and he gets a $12,000 fine? Much like the penalty imposed on Serena Williams after her tirade at the US Open last year, the toothlessness of the punishment able to be imposed on Nalbandian just astonishes.

The question that raises its head here then is: what penalty would be imposed by the other sports around the world for similar conduct? Lets first call Nalbanian’s act what it was: simply it was conduct that brought the game into disrepute of the worst order.  If one considers the worst category of offences of this type and the punishments for same across others sports one is left with the unmistakable notion that the penalty likely to be meted out here is not a deterrent at all.  Indeed faced with such a likely penalty there is a strong argument that reverse effect arises. 

In rugby league, rugby union or AFL a player would find himself on the sidelines for a hefty period of not less than 4 weeks for similar conduct.  In cricket, a player would lose his or her match fee and be suspended for a series of games. In baseball, a penalty of the order of 10 games would likely be dispensed.

Player behaviour will remain as the lead stories of sport’s casts while the deterrent from behaving in such a fashion remains lax.  Tennis it seems sits fair behind what many would consider an acceptable standard for dealing with player behaviour but even so, as I have stated in earlier posts, this is a problem that needs to be dealt with across the board and sooner rather than later.

I leave you with this question: has anyone thought about who will be the next generation of officials? Why would one become an official when the reward for doing ones job (often as a volunteer) is petulance and abuse by players?

What ever happened to the umpire’s always right? An addendum

June 13, 2012 By in Shumpty Speaks Tags: , , 2 Comments

Last week I wrote about the lack of respect shown to sporting officials and lamented that short of the players taking personal responsibility there was nothing really that could be done to restore the maxim that I grew up with (being that “the umpire is always right”) into the sports we all love to watch.

The principal feedback I received was whether I had considered the impact of parental behaviour at sport’s events on the future conduct of players.

To be fair I had considered that factor but really my initial view was that parental behaviour was perhaps not that big an issue in considering the totality of the “player respect” debate. Principally, in my mind, I had only considered my era of playing sport. Going back to those days I can not recall an event of “ugly parent” type behaviour at any of the sport that I had played. Equally, upon reflection it was not anything that I had ever paid attention to: I was too busy playing.

That being the case, I have had a read of recent reports of poor parental behaviour at sport and done a bit of a survey of mates of mine with kids who play sport. Ultimately, from both of these sources I have come to two conclusions:

1. Whilst there are a number of identifiable events of poor parental behaviour at sport, such behaviour does not appear to be happening at every game of sport played by children; and

2. It would be silliness to suggest that the behaviour of parents does not impact on the views of child / player with respect to the role that officials play in sport.

From a personal perspective I always had role models around me, in my parents and coaches, who hammered into me the maxim that the “umpire is always right”. I concede the obvious here that if the role models of players are not imparting and reinforcing that maxim then they are not likely to live by it like the sportsmen of my generation.

I wonder if that is to simplistic though: the people playing the sports we love are all adults. They all live by their own values systems and on the basis of their own judgments. It is trite to say, given what flows above, but at some point the excuses have to stop and personal responsibility for ones conduct must come to the fore.

I finish on a point that has been rattling around my head the last couple of days: if the boot was on the other foot would the players routinely abusing officials expect to be respected? I would suggest that they would and they would be lying if they posited otherwise. If that is the case, why does it seem to be foreign for those players to show some respect?