Merv Hughes' Best Sporting Insults: A Collection of Killer Lines from Our Favourite Aussie Sports
By Merv Hughes
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Merv Hughes' Best Sporting Insults - Merv Hughes
MERV HUGHES'
BEST
SPORTING
INSULTS
MERV HUGHES'
BEST
SPORTING
INSULTS
A collection of killer lines from
our favourite Aussie sports
with Daniel Pace
First published in 2010
Introduction © Merv Hughes 2010
All other material © Daniel Pace 2010
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.
Allen & Unwin
83 Alexander Street
Crows Nest NSW 2065
Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available
from the National Library of Australia
www.trove.nla.gov.au
ISBN 978 1 74237 519 9
Internal design by Squirt Creative
Set in 12/16 pt Gill Sans by Squirt Creative
Printed in Australia by Ligare Pty Ltd, Sydney
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
CONTENTS
Introduction by Merv Hughes
Sledging 101 by Daniel Pace
Cricket
Rugby Union
Rugby League
AFL
Soccer
Tennis
Golf
Boxing
Best of the Rest
INTRODUCTION
BY MERV HUGHES
Why is it that whenever the conversation turns to sledging and insults in sport, everyone in the room turns around and looks at me?
I didn’t invent sledging and I was certainly not the best at it. Perhaps I was more obvious because I had to do it from the middle of the pitch—seeing as I couldn’t be bothered running right to the batsmen’s end to deliver my insult sotto voce.
Why do we insult our opposition? Psychological advantage at the highest level. Performance is so much tied up in the factors that contribute to a player’s ‘mental attitude’—and these are especially self-image and confidence—held together by the power of concentration. As a bowler, I used sledging to try to undo one or all of these things in my opponents.
A sportsperson’s confidence is based on the ability to perform at the level required to win. Sledging is about finding a real or invented weakness in another’s technique or approach in the hope that highlighting it might lead to undermining their confidence. At the highest level of competiton this can mean the difference between winning and not. Although the analysis is elegant, the implementation of a strategy based on undermining confidence can be as unsophisticated as what I once said to Robin Smith after beating him outside off stump three balls in a row: ‘You can’t f**king bat.’ His response was to hit my next delivery for four runs and to reply, ‘We make a good pair, Merv. I can’t f**king bat and you can’t f**king bowl.’ This told me three things about Smith: he had a sense of humour; he was confident enough to take me on (so confidence was important to him and so, probably, was pride); and he was thinking about what I had said to him, so if I kept at him, there was a chance I could disrupt his concentration. It took me three days, but eventually I worked out a strategy.
Allan Border told me on a rest day that Smith was planning to stare me down if I sledged him. When play resumed, I