Sport is mostly about competition and rivalry. If human beings were not combative, wrote the former England captain and psychoanalyst, Mike Brearley, no one would have invented sport.
Rivalry is stitched into the fabric of sport; you cannot have competition without rivalry. A round of golf or tennis or table tennis at your club or among friends loses all meaning if rules are not followed and if allowance is not made for winning and losing. “I am not letting you win” is as much a challenge among friends as it is, in a more sophisticated way, about professional sportspersons playing for their national teams.
