Recovery

(from defeat, loss, illness: one and the same?)

When you are a professional sportsman, defeat is hard to take at any time. When it’s in the 4th round of the FA Cup, against a side from the league below you, on your own home ground and with the promise of a 5th round tie against a premiership side, however well you have trained your mind psychologically to deal with defeat – and my son-in-law is very skilled in that, enabling him to get up and get on with the job, with minimum self-deprecation – sometimes it is nearly impossible to rationalise it by thought processes alone. In these circumstances, recovery of confidence is much slower than normal and can take it’s toll in all sorts of ways, including sleep, mood, relationships, team spirit. This is particularly worsened when you’re surrounded by a squad of players, each of whom, in varying degrees, is having their own struggle to come to terms with losing such an opportunity.

There is no easy way through this horrible situation, other than to put one foot in front of the other, do something physical (not too much to ask of a footballer, more so for their fans), get back into the saddle, run up hill for a while!

It’s not unlike having to recover from illness.

I’ve used the traditional Japanese Haiku form for the poem, because it distills the message into brevity; so appropriate to a situation where few words are needed.

(Read the Poem)