It Ends In Defeat…
INTERVIEWER
In terms of results Mick, one win in seventeen. It can’t go on like this, can it?
MICK MCCARTHY (Manager of Blackpool F.C.)
It can.
***
I have spent most of my life on the losing team.
In year 4, I was the only kid in the Turtles swimming group that did not make the cut to move up to the Dolphins squad. In year 5, my rugby team played more games with the mercy rule (where the game switched from tackle to touch) than without. In year 10, I got subbed into a basketball game, received the ball off the in-bound and performed a textbook layup into the wrong hoop, increasing the deficit from 10 points to 12.
As someone without significant natural sporting prowess, I learnt over time (with the occasional tears after chopping the ball onto my own stumps) how to deal with loss. Playing sport has filled a casual and social component of my life, while also providing the satisfying and humbling experience of incrementally improving at something you are astoundingly ordinary at.
What I am not mediocre at is watching sport.
For the teams I follow with maddening loyalty, losses are not a small inconvenience. They are a weekly test of my emotional regulation—at any point in the season I can be hit with pride, anger, resentment, embarrassment, sadness, confusion, and frustration.
You don’t always have to lose. If you are lucky, one day you will experience something like the 2026 New York Knicks playoff run—caught up in the never-ending melody of that ‘Empire State of Mind’, Mamdani mania, Brunson magic, Timothée Chalamet courtside hype montage—and you will fly.
But for all these moments to happen, someone must have the reverse pulled on them. They must be crushed; dropped from the heights of mesmerising Jude Bellingham edits and the four-week course in ‘Wonderwall’ to a dark place where the beer tastes stale and the footballs that come home are deflated and covered in mud.
***
No losses have ever consumed me more than the 17 that my favourite football club, Tottenham Hotspur, received in the 2025/26 Premier League season.
For those fortunate enough to have no knowledge of Tottenham, it is one of the “Big Six” teams in the English Premier League, perennially stuck at that tier below winners. It is a team known for getting close but never quite winning the whole thing. “Spursy” is the phrase rivals use to describe the unbelievable ability for Tottenham to do everything possible to be close to the summit of success, but then to slip at that final moment and be scarred with that feeling of not quite good enough.
Momentarily that changed in the season before last, with Ange Postecoglou leading the club to win the Europa League—the first trophy in 17 years. Ange was the antithesis to “Spursy”, famously doubling down on his insistence for nothing less than victory: “I always win in my second year”. For a moment, it seemed like his affirmations had worked.
Things changed in this most recent season. Tottenham was facing relegation. In the history of the League, Tottenham had never been relegated. I won’t bore you with my armchair tactical breakdowns and pseudo-finance major analysis of the utter mismanagement of the club by the owners. Instead, I will explain what it was like to always lose.
***
At this year’s Sydney Writer’s Festival, the American Thai writer Tony Tulathimuttee spoke about his most recent work of fiction, Rejection (2024). As a collection of inter-connected short stories, the work, with depraved and comedic style, portrays characters who deal with rejection. In ‘The Feminist’ a self-proclaimed perfect male feminist cannot understand why he is being rejected in his dating life, and in ‘Pics’ a woman’s misunderstanding of a casual fling results in a destructive session of venting in her group chat.
When we are rejected, we develop a counterfactual story for ourselves of what could have happened. The experience is replayed in our minds like rolls of unedited footage, where each internal revision forms a short film of your worst moments. Endlessly replayable without a subscription. These self-narratives become obsessive—trapping us in the thinking of what could be, why did I, why not me, what if this.
Within this phase of the rejection lifecycle, Tulathimutte notices something intimate about this experience. In his complementary Paris Review essay ‘The Rejection Plot’, he explains how experiencing rejection preserves an alternative reality where everything works out. “The process of yearning”, Tulathimutte explains, involves the generation of a dream future that survives the rejection. In the aftermath, there is something wonderful forever out of reach. Rejection, in Tulathimuttee’s view, is not a roadblock in a character’s grand tour; it is a round-about in dreamland that they can never, and might not want to, leave.
But at some point, nausea kicks in for the rejected, unable to handle it happening all over again, and they take the next exit. Admittedly, taking time away is a natural response to personal pain. What is fascinating about Tulathimutte’s characters is that technology provides an escape for them. The feminist rejects society and becomes an admin on a ‘narrow shoulders/open minds’ forum, honouring a duty to educate a fellow subredditor about the structural injustice life throws at people like them. Conversely, in ‘Pics’ the internet is not a communal safety-blanket but becomes so over-used and thin that it provides no warmth at all. The protagonist’s overreliance on her group chat to process rejection has caused it to die, likely replaced with one without her. Instead of shouting into the void, she types into an unresponsive vacuum. Thus, ‘Pics’ concludes with a feeling of nothingness, “The swell of sobs she expects rises up to her stomach, then melts away. Somehow, she doesn’t feel the usual rewarding jab of righteous pain in her chest”, which is more painful than any rejection she faces.
What Rejection proposes is a troublesome bind that the internet can manifest. For some, it has built vast spaces to shield oneself from life outside. For others, it has become so alienating and anonymous that vulnerability is an irrelevant and pointless exercise. If the struggle to push through shame is part of the journey to paradise, can the internet leave you stranded in a place all alone?
***
In those weeks where Tottenham continued to lose, right up until that final game of survival, I asked myself why I kept following so closely. After all, it was devoid of any joy.
To make it worse, kick-offs for Premier League games in Australian time zones can range from a generous 9:30pm to the week ruining 3am. For those games with less of a WOW-factor or because I just want to sleep, my knowledge of the result is the full-time post on Instagram. Opening Instagram feels like clicking the email with your semester results. Somehow the algorithm knows it is the first thing I want to see—a still image of a player in action, “Full-time” in the top left corner, the badges of each club in the bottom left, and the score emboldened and italicised in the bottom right. The caption, more often than not, was “It ends in defeat”.
Those words capture a narrative of rejection. As a piece of flash fiction, the phrase suggests that a series of events has occurred, that the team did play a game of football, and that the unfortunate result of their inability to win was zero points. The team, and its fans, have been rejected—denied the thing they want and the future they think they deserve.
After each game, I would wake in the late morning racking my brain with a headache and counterfactuals. Why did we start this slow midfield? Why did the winger not cross the ball earlier? Why did we not sign a left-back in January? Why, six years ago, did we decide not to back Pochettino? Why, at age eleven, did I make that incredibly bizarre decision to go for Tottenham?
These questions, however, provide evidence that possibility still exists in this story. The dream of footballing perfection is alive and a vision of what should have happened still spins. Blind loyalty is important, but so is the ego of every rejected fan who thinks they know better.
In Gameweek 17 (of 38), the admins realised things were turning from bad to diabolical. “It ends in defeat” was not appropriate anymore. After a 2-1 loss to Liverpool in December, the caption read “Defeat in N17”. Here the narrative gains a place (N17 being the London postcode of Tottenham) but loses the sense of action. By unwinding the story and saying less, there is an effort to minimise the pain. It is like the impulse the character in ‘The Feminist’ feels to shield a newcomer from the oncoming disappointment:
“He remembers thinking: if a stranger can so accurately describe what I’ve thought without even knowing me, they must be right, and I should listen to them. Now he wants to do likewise for this online stranger.”
Eventually, things got so bad that all that could be said was “Full-time”. Seeing those words after humiliations from rivals Arsenal (a 4-1 loss at home in February) and Chelsea (a 2-1 away loss in May) was numbing. Over a 188-day period, where for 15 games Tottenham would not win, the Instagram page became a place where possibility was destroyed and loss was predetermined. It was an attempt at emotional manipulation arising out of a duty to protect my feelings, the same held by Tulathimutte’s feminist: “Words by themselves have no substance he realises, they are only ever meant to underscore acts. Being correct has been its own reward and no reward at all”.
This use of language, reducing 90 minutes to a flash of nothing, highlights a tendency online to contain embarrassment and shame to some other physical domain. If I had watched the game and heard the final whistle, I would have felt the body become hollow as the winning possibility evaporated and left a vacant space inside. I would have had that feeling of searching through emptiness, clinging for whatever I could reach. Instead, social media can point your eyes in different directions, distracting you from the rejection of the thing you crave. You can make it seem like it does not even matter.
The problem here was that it provided no way out. By throttling rejection, I began to lose hope, inverting my imagination towards the scenes of relegation and my inability to wear my insanely expensive jersey for another year. Comments sections, podcasts and TikToks saying the same things. Rejection is painful and embarrassing and can take time to get over. Online spaces are averse to this process, preferring to trap users in an empty room where experience is implausible.
To my luck football games aren’t played in captions and Tottenham survived on the last day of the season: “A crucial win on the final day”. Yet, throughout this period, I kept thinking of this famous Tottenham quote that they should have been using instead— “the game is about glory”. As much as the losses can belittle and punch us, there has to be some belief in the beauty and wonder that is on the other side, if any of us want to survive.
