No colling(back)wood

Well, no judgements are going to be passed in this piece. For the uninitiated, this is what happened

 http://youtube.com/watch?v=Qs-Ye66_Tk4

 Try and listen to the comments from Ian Smith and Nasser Husain.

 The entire incident just made one wonder about what sportsman spirit is all about. One found some interesting takes on the word. Here you go. 

Simon Barnes:

"Sport is dead when citius, altius, fortius is replaced by fixius, drugius, corruptius. We have reached the logical end of sport. Everywhere you look, you find stories of people who have taken the sport out of sport. We expect to hear the decisions on the Italian football match-fixing scandal. The football itself is a sham, going through the motions. The real action takes place on the telephone in the weeks before the game. In England, three jockeys have been suspended from riding after being accused by police of fixing races. The dominant point of this year's Tour de France is not the pedal pushing but the second significant drugs scandal in eight years: the revelation of the incontrovertible fact that professional cycling is institutionally corrupt. These three things - match-fixing, race-fixing, institutionalized drugging - come down to the same thing, and it is the greatest error in all of professional sport The error in question is that sport is about winning. Winning at all costs. That winning is not the most important thing, but the only thing. If you sincerely believe that winning is everything, all the rest follows. If the only ethic is victory, then these things are not options. They are demanded: the least you can do... The essential fact about sport is that you don't know what happens next. No one does. We watch sport not for the victory, but for the struggle. In other words, those that seek victory at all costs are destroying sport. They are creating a spectacle in which we, the punters, have no interest. People are far less interested in track and field athletics than they once were because there has been too much drugging... Professionalism will be the death of sport; or it will, if we carry on believing in it. But at last, we are beginning to see the price of winning at all costs."

Haywood Hale Broun:

"Sports do not build character. They reveal it."

Earl Warren:

"I always turn to the sports section first. The sports page records people's accomplishments; the front page has nothing but man's failures."

J.J. Bentley:

"It is all very well to say that a man should play for the pure love of the game. Perhaps he ought, but to the working man it is impossible".

Every one is free to agree/ disagree with some/ all the above mentioned thoughts.

One just wants to add more complexity to the moral dilemma that Paul Collingwood faced. It was a split second decision for which the England captain has apologised. But what will his decision be, in a similar situation in the winner take all purse match that Mr. Stanford has proposed?

Food for thought?