Musing more about team sports…
It was suggested in Another Place that Formula One racing is a team sport. I don’t think it is, but that’s an arbitrary assessment that I don’t think I could easily defend. Is it because the equipment includes a motor engine? Or because all but one of the team remain stationary? Or is it because it’s a race, and I don’t generally include races as team sports? Because I don’t think of relay races as team sports, which is also arbitrary and difficult to defend.
Thinking about races and sports… the big difference is that there is no team playing defense in a race, isn’t it? I think that’s a big part of what feels like a team sport to me: one team is trying to put a ball in a goal, and the other team is trying to prevent that, and put the ball in a goal themselves, which the first team is trying to prevent. The ‘ball’ and the ‘goal’ are different, sport to sport, and the game’s rules and constraints are going to be different, but basically: ball, goal, defense.
Digression: Both cricket and baseball are complicated in this regard, as the team that is trying to put the ball in the goal is generally considered the defense, and the score is not determined by how often the ball is put in the goal but rather by things that the other team is doing while defending the goal by moving the ball far enough from it. The ball-in-goal part is, essentially, the equivalent of other sports’ time-clock. And also there are functional equivalents of the ball-in-goal, to the point where most batters (or batsmen) get out without the ball hitting the catcher’s glove or the wicket at all. I think that in both sports, people tend to not think about them as ball-in-goal sports at all for decades at a time, and then suddenly there’s a trend that focuses more on the pitcher or bowler and everybody remembers that the team that starts with the ball really is the offense. End Digression.
In a race of any kind, the object is still to put the ball in the goal (the ‘ball’ being generally the athlete, with or in or on a horse or a car or a bicycle, or just as a person, possibly underwater) but there isn’t anyone trying to prevent that. There can be, in some races, some tactical aspect of delaying the other players, but I believe that it’s always a secondary tactic to maximizing your own speed. I’m not really familiar with auto racing, but that’s true in horseracing, at any rate.
So maybe I have difficulty thinking of races as team sports. Not that they aren’t sports, and not that they aren’t often played in teams, but they don’t seem like team sports.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.
Very interesting pieces on team sports!
I haven’t followed auto racing with any closeness in a long time, but something that I think happens in certain auto racing contexts and that definitely happens in professional cycling is that even though people are competing as individuals, there are also teams that formally and deliberately concentrate on strategy to enable one of their members to win. Cycling teams divide up the roles that each team member will need to play in order to enable one member of the team to win the race, such that most of the cyclists are not, in fact, trying to win themselves, but to support someone else. I think this happens to a lesser degree in auto racing, where there are multiple drivers for the same team, such that one driver may work to block the progress of a driver from another team not for their own advantage but for the advantage of another driver on the team. I am reminded of the factions in Byzantine chariot racing (memorably fictionalized by Guy Gavriel Kay in the Sarantine Mosaic), where this kind of coordination is a central feature of the competition.
In a more general sense, I’d say that three cultural components needed have driven the origination and propagation of team sports from England and, secondarily, the United States. These (1) urbanization — you need large groups of people, (2) industrialization – you need (a) to see sports as a form of rural leisure–despite their base being urban–and have the concentration of resources to support people who make the sport (either playing or coaching) a full time occupation, and (3) imperialism, which makes the solidarity, competitive ethos, and quasi-military discipline of team sports culturally attractive. England and the United States had all of these elements early and exceptionally, relative to the rest of Europe.
Other cultural formations could drive the formation of team sports: from what little I know of Native American team sports, I think the factors involved are somewhat different, but there are still some shared features with Anglo-American team sports’ originating impetuses.
Not that a unified field theory of sport is so very important, but it occurs to me that getting the ball in the goal could be seen as a modified race. In a relay race, the runners have to pass the baton–it’s not just about who are the four fastest sprinters when their times are added together. The baton becomes a ball and the finish line becomes a hoop, the hurdles become mobile, human obstacles, and presto — a relay race with hurdles becomes basketball . . .
That’s why I think that defense becomes an important distinction between a race and a sport. I do think that it helps to think of ‘ball’ and ‘goal’ in the broadest of terms—in tag, f’re’x, the ball is you, and the goal is the other players—and in those terms a race is definitely a ball-in-goal game.
But I suppose the other team is ‘defending’ the goal (finish line); by crossing the line, they essentially close the goal and prevent other teams from reaching it.
Thanks,
-V.
My knowledge of auto racing mostly comes from Herbie movies and analogies from horse racing and various winter sport races such as speed skating, but it seems like much of the race is defense. You’re jockeying for position to stop another from passing you or from taking a preferred line or from going at their preferred speed. It’s entirely different from speed trials where you’re just trying to go as fast as possible.
So in a basic race situation, then, there is defense as well as offense, but each player shifts between those roles opportunistically, based on the evolving circumstances of the race, whereas in team sports, the roles tend to be more defined, although the speed and flexibility of the shift from offense to defense varies with the sport? In this respect, baseball and cricket would be at the far end of the continuum from the racing model, as the shift from an offensive to a defensive role cannot happen opportunistically but takes place only when an inning has been completed? In American football, the switches are more regularized but can also occur opportunistically? In soccer, formal switches happen, but opportunistic changes occur much more frequently than formally defined ones?
Soccer, hockey, and basketball all seem like team sports where offense and defense switch opportunistically, although also occasionally along formal lines (when a team scores, which happens vastly more often in basketball; but also on a penalty, which comes up reasonably often in all three).
Hmmm. In each of those sports (Soccer, hockey, basketball) there is nothing in the rules that prevents a defensive team from scoring—that is, if the goalie blocks a shot and the loose puck goes all the way into the other team’s goal, it counts. This seems similar to, say, volleyball, where the difference between a ‘defensive’ and ‘offensive’ touch of the ball is almost subjective (at least sometimes). In baseball and cricket, the rules to not allow anything even remotely like that—during one team’s innings, the rules do not allow the other team to score runs or make outs.
Perhaps there is a spectrum there of fluctuating offense and defense, but cricket and baseball really are just off the scale?
Separately, I don’t know enough about offense/defense in curling or bocce or similar games to know how that works. I have the impression that every stone (or ball) is both offense and defense, in that it counts toward points and blocks a path for the next, but that’s a pretty vague impression.
Yeah; compare to gridiron football, where (at high levels) teams typically have an entirely different set of players for offense and defense; and yet it’s very possible for the defense to score. (An interception or fumble being returned for a touchdown is *way* more common than a hockey or soccer goalie scoring a goal. :^ )
Volleyball is an interesting example because I sort of feel like you can’t actually score while on defense. If the blue team makes a successful dig to prevent the green team from scoring, but accidentally puts the ball over the net rather than passing to the blue setter, and the green team somehow fails to play the ball — perhaps they think it’s going out and let it drop, and it hits the line, that’s not totally uncommon — that feels like a point scored by a defensive *error* on the part of the green team, rather than a point scored by the defense of the blue team. Whereas a gridiron football interception return involves some goal-directed action on the part of the defense — the offensive team may have made an error that led to the interception, but the defense then intentionally does something to turn that error into points. I sort of feel like there really isn’t a volleyball equivalent to that: If you’re intentionally trying to score a point, you’re by definition on offense.