On Wasting Time

Winston Churchill famously remarked that Britain and the United States of America were two nations divided by a common language. Yet even within native English speakers there are linguistic subtleties that express cultural and other normative content. Philosophers of sport are no exception. In Britain we speak of that particular defensive sporting strategy of using game-time in a way that seeks only to nullify the opposition as ‘time-wasting’. In North America a similar (I am not convinced it is a synonym, as will become clear below) strategy is called ‘running down the clock’. Can it be that the differences are merely historical? An anachronism perhaps? I think not. If the former sounds like a neutral technique, a ‘gamewright's strategy’, the latter hints at a litany of vices: slothfulness, indolence, cheating or, to incorporate the Victorian vernacular, ‘conduct unbecoming a gentleman’.

Time wasters literally waste time; they idle the minutes and hours away; they are not productive. These ascriptions gain purchase against a context where phrases such as ‘the devil makes work for idle hands’ are common currency. Among the catalogue of Victorian virtues, ‘industriousness’ certainly ranked highly. Both Cesar Torres (2000) and Scott Kretchmar (2005; 2008) have written of the game skills required to run down the clock. They make it clear how ‘running down the clock’ in time-regulated games is not so a simple a concept as ‘time wasting’ might imply. To run down the clock in American football, basketball, in field hockey or indeed soccer requires individual skill and/or team coordination to withhold the ball from the opposition, to set up defensive positions that protect both territory and ball, and so on. In other sports such as international Test cricket (played over five days), fewer game-skills may be involved but such actions as the setting and re-setting of fielding positions can consume much time while an opposition is frustrated by the lack of opportunities to score runs or the additional challenges to their powers of concentration. Perhaps in sports that are not time-limited the concept of running down the clock can gain no purchase whereas time-wasting may. In tennis, for example, umpires often fail to apply the rule that requires only 30 seconds to be consumed between points in order to make play continuous.

But in football recently the highly regarded manager of Real Madrid Jose Mourinho – no stranger to controversy – appeared to employ a time-wasting strategy that gives philosophers and aficionados of sport an interesting test case. I say ‘time-wasting’ rather than ‘running down the clock’ with some hesitation. It is clear to me that the latter is not a felicitous description. The former is not quite right either, but the moral opprobrium that attaches to it is apt.

The European Champions Cup, perhaps the top club tournament in world football, has several phases of competition. Upon qualification to the European elite each year, the first phase proper of competition is structured so that teams are placed in leagues of four clubs. Upon winning or coming second in their league, successful teams proceed to a knockout tournament. On 23 November 2010 Real Madrid, the Spanish champions, were playing the Dutch team Ajax. Leading 4–0 Real had effectively secured the top spot in their qualifying league. Near the end of the game Mourinho arranged a chain of whispering commands to two players (Xabi Alonso and Sergio Ramos) to procure for themselves yellow-card offences. They did this, not by fouling the opposition but by doing (a complex) nothing.1 Each player deliberately failed to re-start play when a free kick and a goal kick respectively had been awarded. They literally stood by the ball and pretended they were about to kick the ball repeatedly and for so long the referee had little choice but to caution them. The effect of these cautions (added to previous ones they had attained in earlier matches of the competition) was to render them ineligible for the subsequent dead rubber the following week against the French club Auxerre. Moreover, it would mean that the players did not carry over any offences into the knockout stages and so started the games with a clean slate. This gives them a clear strategic advantage over the situation where they might otherwise have gone into the knockout stages with one yellow card, knowing a second would bring an automatic one-game suspension. The governing body, UEFA, subsequently charged Mr Mourinho with ‘improper conduct’ and fined him 40,000 euros (reduced to 30,000 upon appeal), the club 120,000 euros (reduced to 100,000 on appeal), and the players 20,000 euros.

One can reasonably ask, I think, whether a fine is a suitable penalty here. I do not suggest that they should not have been fined for so clearly failing to play the game in the spirit of sport (whatever you might take that phrase to mean) but whether or not having found them guilty, the original status of a yellow card per player ought not to have carried through to the qualifying stages. Such a punishment would appear to be both restorative and reasonable deterrent. But there is a further, conceptual, issue that might serve as material for future philosophy of sports classes.

Philosophers of sport are familiar with the formalist thesis that to play a game one must abide by its defining rules. They will also be familiar with the critique that there are formal and informal rules that serve to determine game-playing behaviour. What makes this special, it seems to me, is that it is open to serious dispute whether what is normally accepted to be a part of the game (such as violent or reckless foul play) extends to this behaviour which is not the gamewrights's running down of the clock but the failure to play in a strict sense: literally, to waste time within the sphere of the game. I do not think that Paul Davis's (2006) objection to Kretchmar (2005), that games-playing entails ranges of action not reducible to skill, represents an objection to my (brief) characterisation here. In this sense there is it at least a prima facie case for saying, given the context and the motivations of Messrs Alonso, Mourinho and Ramos, that they are not playing the game at all.

On a final note, I am pleased to notify readers, and members of the British Philosophy of Sport Association and the European Association for the Philosophy of Sport who automatically receive the journal, that henceforward Sport, Ethics and Philosophy, is published quarterly.

Notes

1. The event, discussed on Dutch TV, can be seen at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=woRnzEVjuVw accessed 7 Dec. 2010. The ruling is reported at http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5i7TkgH0BLRjRXCfGL3XszauRtcDQ?docId=CNG.b9cc66e8282cbcac9efbda058b8506d6.c1, accessed 7 Dec. 2010.