Introduction
Sportsmanship can be defined as playing fair, respect the rules of the game, respecting the judgment of the referees and respecting your opponent team or your own team mates. If you like football, you have seen for sure soccer players exchange shirts, shake hands, help themselves get up after a foul or maybe the best example is when the defeated team applaud the winning team at the end of the game. Sportsmanship is all about fairplay and respect everyone involved in it.
History
Sportsmanship can also be defined as the most important rule in all sports because if u don’t respect your opponents for example you can get the same treatment in return and where would the sport be if we’re watching a fight or bad manners instead of real quality sport. Football to most of us it means performance and entertainment and would be sad to lose all of that if no sportsmanship is shown. The sportsmanship can be shown during the entire game not just to the ones involved directly in it but sportsmanship can be proved to fans also, to the coaches, to the reserves, to the medics and everyone around you. Football to the players should just mean sport, performance and respect.
I do believe that sportsmanship can be a style, a way of life, an attitude and it’s hard to believe that if you treat everyone good you will get something bad in return during a match. Sportsmanship holds a strong value in sport, it has more value than strength, endurance, patience or any other attribute that may be necessary to use in sport. Sportsmanship is about having the mental power to show yourself capable of handling difficult situations, and may help avoiding a conflict. You can show sportsmanship when you endure a loss and you won’t retaliate in different ways that may affect your team or everyone involved in the process. For every athlete sportsmanship has to be about his own pride of upholding his integrity and his moral outlines.
Features
An example of sportsmanship was recently shown by Carlos Tevez who scored two goals for ManchesterCityand he didn’t show his joy because he was playing against his latest team West Ham, he didn’t celebrate the goal, he just raised his hand searching for apology from his oldest fans. Football to Carlos that day was just sportsmanship. Or another example is when players shoot the ball fast outside of the pitch so the medical team can step in, helping the injured player.
If we got an idea of what sportsmanship is, how does a bad sportsmanship look like? Football to Diego Maradona was not enough during Argentina-England 1986. The so called move that Diego did was remembered by fans as “Hand of God”, he pushed with his hand the ball into the net. It was the most famous act of cheating because everyone was watching the quarter finals of the World Cup. The referee didn’t notice the move but the video footage proved the suspicions of all fans were true and there was no “hand of God”, it was just Maradona’s hand.
Football to most of the players and fans should just be a joy to celebrate.
