Jeremy Finlayson: doubly sorry..and the AFL took his remorse to be genuine and was explicit in saying that this contrition was why he was suspended for as few as three matches.to have been suspended, and had to say sorry all over again, trying to explain that he was not pissed off because he thought the suspension was wrong, but at himself for getting suspended at all.
Sorry to say so, but it sure looked and sounded like him. In any case, he has eight weeks to have a good look at himself in the mirror, lest there be any mistaken identity.The sporting apology has become a genre of its own, with dozens of sub-variants. The most innocent, marked by a raised hand, is for an errant ball toss in tennis, or a beamer in cricket. The next most innocent is from a batter to a partner they have just run out .
On and on they go. Sorry for myself, sorry we ever met, sorry you were born, sorry but that’s just who I am . There’s the carefully worded legal apology, made byAnd there’s the plain bullshit sorry, as from the Russian sports minister a few years ago for the venality of athletes from his country found to have cheated under a system he devised and oversaw.
But is it so regrettable that sportspeople say sorry? At least they do, unlike politicians, for instance, who are chronically incapable of admitting error or wrongdoing. Saying sorry does not come any more naturally to athletes than it does to pollies. The competitive drive needed to play top-level sport is almost inherently unapologetic.Of course, some apologies are blatantly – dare we say unapologetically – insincere, and there is in all of them a degree of reputation and brand protection.