Original to be found here: http://www.bluebirdnews.co.uk/sophie-clarke-week-3/
Can you get used to losing? Can you get used to winning? What does it take to drop a game when you’re winning – or start winning when you’re already some goals behind?
To be honest, I don’t know. It’s very well to say that it’s the will to win – that if you want it enough, it will happen. There’s an element of truth to that – if you want it, you work for it, and that often tips the balance in your favour. But I’ve played on teams and rowed in boats and run races in which wanting and working was just not enough.
As much as people say that it’s just about digging deep when you’re behind and you need to come back for the win, there’s also an element of viciousness about when you’re leading – about being almost cruel in continuing to put away the tries and goals and the distance between you. If you get cocky, if you sit back on your laurels, it’s easy to see that get snatched away from you. It’s difficult, too, to keep your head up if the flow of play is in your favour – and then all too soon it turns against you.
I’ve been thinking about this because over the weekend my team lost a match on Friday and then won on Sunday. We haven’t won a match since 14th November (beat Oxford 4-3) so it was long overdue. We’re not a bad team, far from it, but for some reason when we play, we haven’t managed to grasp that higher element, where training and hard work and team spirit all comes together and you trounce whoever you’re playing against. I read about the fantastic work of CUWLC and CULNC and remembered how good it feels to win consistently. It’s difficult to stay peppy and positive if you’re losing all the time – and people forget how great it feels to triumph. You start believing that maybe you are second best – how do you fix what’s wrong? What even is wrong? Why are we losing? Maybe you should be losing if you can’t even figure it out and make it better.
As the women’s water polo finally won after many months, the men’s water polo suffered some unfortunate losses – in one, going from a 3-1 lead to losing 6-3 after conceding 3 goals in 1.5 minutes. I feel their pain as in our BUCS matches this year that is how a few of our games have panned out – the momentum is with you, you go out hard, in control of the play, and then inexplicably everything is slipping from your grasp and the more you work to scramble back, the more everything goes wrong. When you’re on a winning streak and you’ve got all the confidence behind you, the fall is harder when an inevitable loss comes – and it’s tricky then to pick it all back up and make it all seem right.
Now that we’re back on the win train though, we remember how it feels when everything clicks. After the night of RAG Blind Date it feels important to acknowledge that when you play as a real team there’s an element of chemistry there, something more than just working hard and fighting to be the best. I play for my girls and I play for CUSWPC and I play for the sport, because I love it even when I hate the losing. That’s how you come back from losing – whether stopping a bad run of form or suddenly bringing the field level again in the third quarter – when instead of gritting your teeth singularly and trying to do it alone, the whole team digs in and refuses to let it happen that way any more, and you pull up to that higher level of play, where everything works and you can’t be beaten.
So I’ll be closely following the water polo men on Twitter tomorrow as they fight to turn around some tough results – and I’ll be looking to see my girls fight our way up the league on Sunday when we take on Birmingham and the Other Place in our final BUCS matches before the knockout round.
Work hard, play hard, fight together as a team – Light Blue victories all the way. Simple.
