LOVE a sporting quiz.
My heid is full of wee motors that have boots crammed with trivia, roof racks piled high with stats, glove compartments packed with fitba' nonsense.
My daily trial is to remember where I have left my car yet I could name you, say, an Ipswich Town team of the late 70s off the top of my head. I use a Rothman's Football Yearbook as a bunnet.
Curiously, there is as much call for that arcane knowledge nowadays as for a unicorn herder but whenever someone mentions a sporting quiz then my Dumbo-like ears twitch, precipitating what MidWest Americans call a twister.
In casual conversation with a mate (I was wearing flip flops and a Hawaiian shirt, if you must know) he mentioned a cricketer who had lost three toes and asked me to name him. I christened him Stumpy.
No, I did not. I knew he was and indeed is Martin Guptill, the New Zealand cricketer, who lost his toes in a forklift accident.
My mate Mick, the psychotic amateur left-back, strangely had a total of seven toes. He wore them in a necklace. They once belonged to persons unknown. They served as proof of his awful tackles made and bloody battles won. As did the shrunken heids he kept on the mantelpiece.
But this is not going to be a column about amateur football violence. That was the topic of last week. And the week before. And, yes, the week before that.
No, this week's subject is going to be the culture of the dressing-room. Guptill's misfortune has earned him the nickname Two Toes. This testifies to the average sportsman's need to address misfortune in a team-mate with routine cruelty.
The dressing-room is the most merciless arena in the world. Well, outside the sports desk conference and the briefing and illustrated flightplan for a squadron of a kamikaze pilots.
To survive the male dressing-room, one has to have three traits:
1. a skin as tough as a character in City of God;
2. an ability to fire back like a character in City of God;
3. a tetanus injection;
One also needs to accept the rules. There is no HR in the dressing room, though there is every chance of MRSA.
Most accept that there will be heavy slagging and it must be endured otherwise it will simply be increased. This is why young Guptill can hammer out runs unaffected by his mates making fun of his accident.
One can protest that such crude humour is not right. One might say this culture should be changed. But this sort of innocence is on a par in its naivety with expecting a LibDem politician to tell the truth about a leak.
The dressing-room banter/cruelty/bullying comes under the term team bonding. One can find a way to live with it or one walks away. It is never compulsory to stay in a dressing-room.
Most slagging is a way of telling your team-mate you love him without buying him flowers and a card. The latter approach rarely works, trust me.
However, a major rule of the dressing-room is that there may be affection, there may even be friendship but it is not mandatory. One can cordially hate a team-mate and still be involved in a successful unit. To stick to cricket, Don Bradman was loathed by some of his fellow Aussies but they formed a hugely successful side.
The Bradman dissidents took the view that he may be tosser of caber-throwing proportions but he did score runs and that tends to help if one's ambition is to win Test matches. Many successful teams have at least one member who would finish runner-up to Ed Miliband in a popularity contest.
This is why the Kevin Pietersen furore has somewhat puzzled me. Not because it has gathered more newsprint that a soap star's wedding. Not that celebrity fans have backed him.
No, what has surprised me is that some former cricketers have supported KP's potential inclusion in an England side. They must have forgotten the unbreakable rule of dressing-rooms.
It is this: one must never give comfort to the enemy. This, for example, is something Bradman or any other great would never do.
It is all right having a few pints with rivals after a match. Indeed, once upon a time it was mandatory but one does not send them texts criticising someone one is playing alongside. Never.
The first tenet of team sport is that it is Them v Us. Now Us might just be as dysfunctional as The Simpsons on meth. Us may also be the team that argues with the unrestrained fury of a weightlifter who has overdosed on steroids. But Us can never be team that has a member that criticises a team mate to the opposition.
Alvin Martin, the West Ham Scouser, was so apoplectic about this that I almost understood him on radio the other week. His invective about never, ever slagging a team-mate to the opposition was merely stating the obvious for those of us who survived dressing-rooms.
KP was, in the lore of team sport, guilty of betrayal. It is why he was given the boot. Guptill, in contrast, has accepted the baiting and, erm, toed the line.
One of them continues to play Test cricket. Guess who? Not much of a sporting quiz but it will do until I find my car.
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