Opinion – Marina Izidro: It’s not just about winning or losing, but about having the courage to try

A statement by Jorginho had a lot of repercussion in recent days. After Italy failed to qualify for the World Cup, the Italian-born Brazilian told Rai Sport that he will think for the rest of his life about the penalties he missed in the qualifiers against Switzerland. If he had converted them, he wouldn’t have had to play the repechage. The Azzurri were defeated by North Macedonia and left out of the Qatar World Cup.

Jorginho is an excellent player and a man trusted by Thomas Tuchel at Chelsea and Roberto Mancini at the national team. Obviously, the responsibility is not his, as football is a team sport. The outburst generates empathy not only because of the ability to sympathize with the pain of others, but also because all of us, in some situation or measure, have already been very close to failure or success. This text is not a criticism of those who lose, but a compliment to those who have the courage to bet on what they believe.

In high performance, the distance between ecstasy and sadness is as small as it is cruel. In the documentary Arsene Wenger Invincible, the French coach who spent 22 years at Arsenal says that “life is a matter of millimeters.” Wenger describes painful defeats to rivals Manchester United and a challenge he threw out to his team in 2002: winning the Premier League without suffering a defeat.

The players thought he had gone mad, the press called him arrogant. It didn’t work. “I still think you can do it,” he insisted. The following season Arsenal were champions in advance and Wenger teased: “Do you want to settle for the win or do something special, become immortal?” Believing in an almost impossible dream became motivation. They went 38 games without losing, and the team that became known as the Invincibles –”Invincibles”- went down in history. What if they had never tried?

Discovering the recipe for victory or defeat in sport and how to deal with both has fascinated scholars for years. In the book Soccernomics, by journalist Simon Kuper and economist Stefan Szymanski, one of the chapters is: “Why England loses and other Europeans win”. The title is realistic as, basically, the country that invented football won a World Cup at home in 1966 – and that was it.

Through the analysis of results, competitions, coaches and players profiles, the authors contest, for example, the theory that foreigners in the Premier League limit the formation of English talents for the national team. Even using science and statistics as a basis, they remember that teams also need luck and that, in tournaments like the World Cup, the difference between becoming a legend or a failure can be a ball that hits the post.

Athletes deal with pressure and frustration from an early age, they are subject to criticism and they have to know how to deal with it. But credit must be given to the bravery of taking risks. To those who take a penalty in football, they try the decisive basket in basketball, the point of the title in volleyball, to the judoka who loses the fight that was worth the gold and minutes later returns to the mat in search of bronze.

This is how great champions and unforgettable stories are created. Whether it’s the medal dispute or, in our case, changing jobs, changing relationships, looking for something different in life: it can go wrong, but would you rather try or not do anything? If you choose the second option, you will never know what would have happened.