On the importance of oversight
Sometimes you need to take the medicine. Even if it tastes bad. .
The thing about living in a bubble is that it’s hard to see what’s happening outside of it.
You create a world where every action you make is informed by mores that were self-created to justify behaviours that often wouldn’t be accepted outside of that protective bubble. So when the rest of the world — a world unaware of the rules and norms of your environment — sees inside it they often come away confused or even appalled by what they see.
To put this in a less academic way, isolated groups often crawl so far up their own behinds that they start to think their flatulence smells like perfume. So, when they show up at the ball wearing La’fart, they have difficulty understanding why no one will dance with them.
On a related note, Bev Priestman finally spoke this week. In the fashion of the times, it was on her personal Instagram page. Do take the time to read it as it is a fantastic example of shifting blame and sorry-not-sorry tone deafness that we’ve come to expect from those involved in “DroneGate.”
The quick summary is that she hopes good will come from this, the players did great, eh! and remember that fight we put up for gender equality? That was good, wasn’t it?!
Responsibility was not taken. Part of that was likely strategic — I’m sure that she’s gotten some legal advice to stay away from admitting blame — but most of it is learned behaviour from spending a decade in the John Herdman coaching tree. As I wrote last week, that world doesn’t accept that others have the right to be critical of their actions. Questioning any aspects of the operation gets one labeled as an enemy — you are a “hater,” not simply someone trying to hold power to account (or even just someone who wants the best for the sport and the players).
We need to view this cheating scandal as part of larger issue in Canadian sport (and, really, Canadian society) — a lack of effective oversight by independent media. The story of drone use was there to be reported on by anyone (yes, including myself), but no one did.
The reasons for that are legitimate — the team put up effective walls that were supported by aggressive Canada Soccer gatekeeping and exaserbated by a lack of resources among those journalists that do actually cover the team. Chasing a story like this takes months and resources that most don’t have, especially those that have to produce on the daily to survive. There’s no ability to do enterprise reporting when you need to write about who TFC waived this week so that you can eat next.
That’s especially the case when you might end up getting shut out of access if you write something that the team and Canada Soccer don’t like. They wouldn’t have liked someone reporting on their efforts to find marginal gains through the observation of opponent's practice sessions.
As suggested at the start of this article, groups that operate without oversight tend to lose the ability to critically evaluate themselves. They become so ingrained in the culture they created that they cannot see issues that may be glaringly obvious to outsiders.
This is profoundly dangerous. In many ways, soccer is lucky to “only” have gotten caught cheating this time. One needs only to look at the horrors we are learning about Hockey Canada and the World Juniors now, or of what happened at USA Gymnastics over many years, to name just two of far too many abuse scandals in sports. Including, of course, Bob Birarda and the Vancouver Whitecaps.
We need independent oversight. That means an effective and independent media that is allowed to cover our national teams without fear of being censored for negative reporting.
The teams may not like this initially, but to them I ask this: What’s worse? Having to answer some tough questions at a press conference from time to time, or crawling so far up your own ass that you think it’s a good idea to fly a drone over a practice facility at the Olympics?
Only one of those gets you suspended from all football related activities for a year.
So true.