What Can You Learn from Football?

If you live in Canada, you are likely aware that this past weekend was the annual Grey Cup game in Calgary, the championship game of football for the Canadian Football League. And if you live in Saskatchewan, or are one of the many fans of the Saskatchewan Roughriders, you will be painfully aware of their near-victory, and the stunning loss with no time on the clock.

The painful story of the loss is that Saskatchewan took a dumb penalty on a last-second field goal attempt, which the opposition team had missed. The "too many men on the field" penalty allowed the team to re-kick, and they scored, putting them ahead by one point, and giving them the Grey Cup Championship. Across media of every type, fans and commentators are moaning about or rejoicing those last few seconds of the game. I think that the game was lost much earlier.

In piping and pipe band competitions, it is common knowledge that if you leave the door open in some way [note error, missed attack, saggy D, over-blown F/G, missed break] a fellow competitor—or maybe a judge—will walk through it, and you will lose. It doesn't always happen, but you approach the massed bands thinking it's quite likely.

So, when the Riders missed that field goal in the first quarter of play, I wondered if those missed three points would come back to bite them. And, after Montreal's last touchdown, and the missed two-point conversion, all the Riders needed was to move the ball for a couple of first downs, and they'd have won. They didn't. With the game in hand, they failed to get the yards they needed, and really [it has to be said]: Montreal deserved a shot at a last-minute field goal.

And even after all that, the Riders had the chance to win because the Montreal kicker shanked the ball [again] and missed, giving the Riders the last-minute win...until the penalty was called. My point is: that game could have been won by the Roughriders at several points before the last-second kick, and had they executed fully, Montreal would not have had the chance for that kick, or if they had, it would not have been enough points to win.

Contests, be they football or bagpipes, are about controlling all the things you can, as well as you can. When you make mistakes, you shouldn't expect to win. Don't blame this one on the 13th man, the game had slipped out of the Riders' grasp already.

This has two important "take aways" for piping. First, prepare for competition by focussing on all the things in your control, and not thinking about the things you can't control. And second, when things go wrong, think about the things that you could have done differently, rather than all the other stuff that might have affected the outcome.

Tough stuff. At the end of the day, the "near wins" are the hardest losses to take.