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    Merv Hughes' Best Sporting Insults: A Collection of Killer Lines from Our Favourite Aussie Sports
    Merv Hughes' Best Sporting Insults: A Collection of Killer Lines from Our Favourite Aussie Sports
    Merv Hughes' Best Sporting Insults: A Collection of Killer Lines from Our Favourite Aussie Sports
    Ebook85 pages31 minutes

    Merv Hughes' Best Sporting Insults: A Collection of Killer Lines from Our Favourite Aussie Sports

    By Merv Hughes

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    About this ebook

    Australian sportsmen are known worldwide for their hilarious and, quite frankly, inspired sledges. Over the years, there have been some classic lines uttered on a variety of sporting fields and arenas, whether it's across the cricket pitch or on the footie field. Now, for the first time, we have the ultimate collection of sporting insults brought together by a man with a reputation for his humorous witticisms and cutting sledges: Merv Hughes. Merv Hughes' Best Sporting Insults will amuse any sports fan for hours.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAllen Unwin
    Release dateDec 1, 2010
    ISBN9781742692067
    Merv Hughes' Best Sporting Insults: A Collection of Killer Lines from Our Favourite Aussie Sports

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      Book preview

      Merv Hughes' Best Sporting Insults - Merv Hughes

      MERV HUGHES'

      BEST

      SPORTING

      INSULTS

      MERV HUGHES'

      BEST

      SPORTING

      INSULTS

      A collection of killer lines from

      our favourite Aussie sports

      with Daniel Pace

      First published in 2010

      Introduction © Merv Hughes 2010

      All other material © Daniel Pace 2010

      All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

      Allen & Unwin

      83 Alexander Street

      Crows Nest NSW 2065

      Australia

      Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available

      from the National Library of Australia

      www.trove.nla.gov.au

      ISBN 978 1 74237 519 9

      Internal design by Squirt Creative

      Set in 12/16 pt Gill Sans by Squirt Creative

      Printed in Australia by Ligare Pty Ltd, Sydney

      10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

      CONTENTS

      Introduction by Merv Hughes

      Sledging 101 by Daniel Pace

      Cricket

      Rugby Union

      Rugby League

      AFL

      Soccer

      Tennis

      Golf

      Boxing

      Best of the Rest

      INTRODUCTION

      BY MERV HUGHES

      Why is it that whenever the conversation turns to sledging and insults in sport, everyone in the room turns around and looks at me?

      I didn’t invent sledging and I was certainly not the best at it. Perhaps I was more obvious because I had to do it from the middle of the pitch—seeing as I couldn’t be bothered running right to the batsmen’s end to deliver my insult sotto voce.

      Why do we insult our opposition? Psychological advantage at the highest level. Performance is so much tied up in the factors that contribute to a player’s ‘mental attitude’—and these are especially self-image and confidence—held together by the power of concentration. As a bowler, I used sledging to try to undo one or all of these things in my opponents.

      A sportsperson’s confidence is based on the ability to perform at the level required to win. Sledging is about finding a real or invented weakness in another’s technique or approach in the hope that highlighting it might lead to undermining their confidence. At the highest level of competiton this can mean the difference between winning and not. Although the analysis is elegant, the implementation of a strategy based on undermining confidence can be as unsophisticated as what I once said to Robin Smith after beating him outside off stump three balls in a row: ‘You can’t f**king bat.’ His response was to hit my next delivery for four runs and to reply, ‘We make a good pair, Merv. I can’t f**king bat and you can’t f**king bowl.’ This told me three things about Smith: he had a sense of humour; he was confident enough to take me on (so confidence was important to him and so, probably, was pride); and he was thinking about what I had said to him, so if I kept at him, there was a chance I could disrupt his concentration. It took me three days, but eventually I worked out a strategy.

      Allan Border told me on a rest day that Smith was planning to stare me down if I sledged him. When play resumed, I

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