Unbreakable and The Edge
The limits of life lessons from the world of sport
The sentiment that sport is more serious and important than it is, and can teach us a lot about life, actually, remains a fertile furrow to plough for writers and broadcasters, despite a significant body of evidence that suggests a lot of top sportsmen and women emerge from the cauldron of elite competition completely unequipped for a life without it.1
The idea of sport providing valuable life lessons was also a favoured topic of male P.E. teachers back in the day, who would punctuate their angry bollockings with occasional philosophical chats during which we were invited to consider how whatever gruelling and repetitive rugby drills we were being told to do as 11-year-olds would actually help us in adulthood.
I never enjoyed rugby at school, and the harsh treatment meted out eroded my enthusiasm for sport in general. At times, it felt a little bit like being in the army, with a lot of emphasis on nebulous notions of commitment and self-sacrifice in service of a higher goal, when all many of us could see was a muddy field and the prospect of getting slammed into it by bigger boys, a prospect we did not find appealing.2
Current thinking has evolved a little; my interest was particularly piqued by coverage of Unbreakable: England 2003 (Discovery+) during which members of the Rugby World Cup winning squad of 2003 attempt to contend with the mental and physical damage inflicted upon them by their chosen profession.
The idea that being shouted at endlessly to slam your head and body into others’ heads and bodies would have some kind of permanent and negative effect doesn’t exactly seem like a revelation — indeed, it was the basis of my objections at the time— but in Unbreakable, we do at least hear it from people who loved the sport and heartily embraced its philosophies of hard work and commitment over the course of a 20-year career.
Front and centre in the documentary is the former prop forward Phil Vickery, best known to me as the 2011 winner of Celebrity Masterchef, who saw off Kirsty Wark and the guy who plays3 Tony in Hollyoaks in the final.
It’s hard to reconcile the gentle bear of a man who still regularly ambles into the returning winners round of Masterchef and provides generous appraisals of the food in a soft Cornish accent with this film’s blurry pre-match footage of him angrily yelling expletives. But, in a way, this touches on the issues under consideration here: that there was never much consideration given to the person rather than the player.
Training hard and hitting things harder was seen as part of what was required for success. The players accepted this unquestioningly, taking pride in their level of commitment. And it did bring them the ultimate prize: in sport, the ends often justify the means.
Except that once the success stops — which it does, for everyone, eventually — the person underneath is left to fend for themselves. And in some sports, including rugby, a level of financial security does not necessarily follow achievements on the pitch. Hence appearances on Strictly, Masterchef, and any other number of celebrity-based TV opportunities that provide an opportunity to earn money.
Jonny Wilkinson, the superstar of the 2003 team, who famously appeared in an advert for Adidas with David Beckham prior to the tournament,4 speaks very well and with some apparently hard-earned self-awareness about being someone who at that stage knew nothing of life other than rugby, while old photographs and video camera footage show a frankly terrified looking young man trying in vain to relax during team meals and bonding sessions.
If Wilkinson has belatedly found some mental equilibrium, his teammate Steve Thompson — like Vickery, a forward who spent a lot of time in the scrum — has to contend with early onset dementia. He is no longer able to remember anything of the 2003 victory, and declares to Vickery that, if he had his time again, he wouldn’t play rugby professionally, knowing the consequences.
For all of its admirable intentions, Unbreakable feels slightly truncated in length and a little uncertain in its conclusions. The upshot is that the 2003 squad have set up a charity to support future generations of rugby players, as well as raise awareness of the issues these champions have suffered, worthy causes both.
Similar issues, in cricket, were the subject of the 2019 documentary The Edge (available on DVD, or to rent digitally via Apple TV), which focused on the very successful England team of 2009-2013, that pulled itself from the PR disaster of both coach and captain being sacked prior to the 2009 tour of the West Indies to reach number 1 in the world two years later, and ultimately secured three consecutive Ashes victories.5
Again, there is a theme about hard work and building toughness bringing results, but leaving the players short of the kind of resilience they needed when things started to go wrong.
As in Unbreakable, the players generally accepted what they were asked to do at the time as the price worth paying for success, although the role played in the 2010-11 Ashes win by a pre-series boot camp in Bavaria — which, on the basis of this footage, was very much a rugby-style combination of physical punishment and campfire cod philosophy — doesn’t seem to have been universally accepted.
Indeed, the players seem to have mostly hated it, but in the afterglow of victory, the conclusion is drawn: this was the moment that brought the squad together and developed the toughness which delivered their success. But unsuccessful sides have trained hard before, and been on brutal and punishing boot camps, without subsequently achieving good results.6
By the same token, it seems unfair to blame the eventual collapse and breakup of the side entirely on those same methods: the scheduling of back-to-back Ashes series in 2013-14 was always likely to take a toll on the players, and though England overcame an Australian side undermined by off-field controversies and misguided selections on home soil, their opponents were able to regroup for the away leg.7
Cricket can be an intensely lonely sport, even at the lowest levels: a team game where there is intense focus on the individual for certain periods, during which time failure can be short and sharp — with the bat, all it takes is one ball — or long and drawn out, in the case of a bowler struggling to find form and rhythm, called upon to keep running in regardless.
In between, it provides ample opportunity for introspection and self-pity: sitting on the sidelines while your colleagues bat, or finding yourself alone in the field, where there also exists countless opportunities to compound your misery by fumbling the ball or dropping a catch.
At the highest level, Test cricket, you can add in the ingredients of a hostile crowd and having to live away from home for months on end, while you play the same opponents again and again, honing in on your weak spots and hammering home any advantage. There’s nowhere to hide: no possibility of resetting, changing things up, or rebuilding confidence against a different team.
The mental struggles of the 2013-14 squad are best encapsulated by batsman Jonathan Trott, whose top-level career was effectively ended after the first Test of that series, amid barbs from opponents (Australian opener David Warner said Trott had ‘scared eyes’ and that his dismissals were ‘pretty weak’) and some well-intentioned but misguided obfuscation from management regarding the nature of his struggles.
For The Edge, Trott has evidently — and gamely — agreed to pad up in era-appropriate England kit, and be filmed walking around in a field and being pushed into a swimming pool, in the name of capturing some arty footage representative of his turmoil.
As with Unbreakable, The Edge has noble aims in terms of discussion of mental health in sport — although cricket doesn’t have the same questions about the damage done by physical trauma to answer — with a percentage of the profits donated to a mental health charity. But it arguably also fails to answer the questions it poses.
Coach Andy Flower, provided an opportunity to reflect on his methods, considers that he might do some things differently, given his time again. The current England regime, under Brendon McCullum, achieved a turnaround in results in 2022 with a philosophy based on a belief that relaxed players are more likely to do well, and there is enough pressure out there already, without adding to it internally.
But, as has been mentioned already: sport is a results business, and when those results go against your team, questions are turned on that philosophy: do players care enough? Are they too relaxed? Some of the players featured in The Edge, found here reflecting on whether they were pushed too hard, have subsequently reappeared in the media to wonder aloud if the same treatment should be dished out to the current team.8
‘Life as a professional sportsman doesn’t necessarily lend itself to you being a good person,’ says former England wicket-keeper Matt Prior in The Edge. ‘Because it’s about winning… I’m not sure you can be the best person you can be when that’s on the line.’
Ultimately, both films are reluctant to completely abandon the notion that what damaged the players in these successful teams was actually necessary in the first place. Sport may have something to teach us about life, but perhaps it still has a bit of learning to do itself.
In 2008, the Middlesex and England batsman Ed Smith wrote a book entitled What Sport Tells Us About Life, which went down very well with the type of people who already think that sport does tell us a lot about life. To be fair, the ‘us’ Smith was referring to is the fan, rather than the professional participant; with a double first from Cambridge, he always thought more deeply and broadly about the game than your typical pro, which didn’t necessarily endear him to colleagues.
My understanding is that at least two of the men who used to teach rugby at my old school subsequently suffered some kind of mental breakdown, which either demonstrates some kind of coincidental misfortune, or that their philosophy for living was not perhaps the panacea for all of life’s ills after all.
Yes — I checked — still. He’s the Ian Beale of Hollyoaks.
This was in Beckham’s phase of missing crucial penalties by blasting them 10 miles over the bar, which some unkindly linked back to this advert and his tutorials with Wilkinson, for whom getting the ball over the bar was — of course — the aim.
As a child of the 90s who thought England could not and would not ever win the Ashes, this was the stuff of dreams at the time.
I should say that this is the kind of thing Ed Smith would put in one of his books, although he would doubtless put things a little more eloquently.
While it suits the narrative of The Edge to present the subsequent 5-0 collapse on that tour as an unprecedented falling apart of a great side (although it’s true that it was a dreadful tour that precipitated retirements and fallouts aplenty), it was arguably a repeat of the experience of the mid-00s team — one which contained some of the same players — which climbed the summit to beat all comers, including the great Australian side of 2005 at home, before collapsing to the same opponents in the return series.
My own feelings, for what they’re worth, is that there’s a certain alchemy in getting the right group of people together at any particular moment and creating an environment that allows the players to thrive and perform well. But even the most successful combinations of players and coaching philosophies also have a limited shelf life.