Why it's impossible to lose.

[Fat Pang]

I've just been reading Kevin Hench on Fox Sports website. In his article, he examines why the Patriots lost their recent divisional match-up to Denver, more specifically he breaks down each and everyone of the five turnovers that were suffered by the Pats. I can tell you he was pretty upset.

Incandescent with rage and misquoting Thomas Hobbes, he slams each and every one of the hapless Pats who comitted these deadly sins and doesn't spare them his blistering rhetoric. Each player has his transgression broken down in its unforgiveable detail and then Kevin comes to his inescapable conclusion, namely that they are directly responsible for ending the Patriots blessed Dynasty.

Remarkable stuff, the best part of which comes when he discusses ''The worst pass interference call in the history of the NFL". Well, it's my favourite anyway.

It brought me to a startling realisation...............that it's impossible to lose in the NFL.

I don't mean this in an absolute sense of course ,as we are all too aware after this season, that it's remarkably easy to lose in the right circumsatnces. I mean that it's impossible to just lose.

Losing, you see, is impossible because it must inevitably as light follows day be someon'e fault. Someone, some incredibly nasty,fraudulent,machiavellian,gutless, cowardly,choking,meritless, moronic, fool is responsible. In particularly heinous cases we can even go plural and say fool(s) as poor Kevin has.

People who have previously been responsible for some of the most glorious sporting moments of our lives deliberately set out to destroy our faith in them, the team, the NFL, the officials and quite frankly the universe at large through their bewildering ineptitude. People who have demostrated fierce competetive urges throughout their lives now actively try to lose.

There is no earthly chance that it could have been a mistake, an error, a happenchance, that which Clausewitz termed 'Friction', unhappy fortune, or the Karmic result of previous action.

No, they did it deliberately or even worse through moronic negligence.

Kevin Hench is merely the standard bearer for hordes of sport fans who refuse to even comtemplate, that in any sporting contest there are going to be those who don't want you to win and actually try their best to stop you (the opposition), there are going to be those who don't see things the way you do (the officials) and there are going to be those who occasionally have an off-day (our own players),and that sometimes it's necessary for us to lose in appalling circumstances.

Oddly enough,it seems that this view surfaces more frequently in those places where success has been tasted rather than where it's routinely avoided. People you see begin to take their teams success for granted, it become a 'right' rather than an achievement.

It's surfaced here recently with the debate over SB36.

To me it's all fairly spurious stuff and not a bit unreasonable too.

I have of course been guilty of it myself on occasion. My wife remembers quite clearly my screaming incoherently at the TV during SB36 and waking her up.

Sometimes, despite the best of intention and preparation teams justlose even the ones we support.

We can be objectively critical without indulging in Hench's kind of vitriol. We can make a case for change without this nonsense.

I don't for a moment think Marmie was the right man as DC for example but I don't think his ineptitude was deliberate or moronic. I don't think that Shaw is the right man to head up the front office but........(ok, forget that part)

Nobody meant it, nobody was bought, nobody was part of a conspiracy you just lose sometimes, accept it and move on.