When you’re immobilised for a while, you have a lot of time to think. Recent events caused me to ponder the massive effort we put into finding meaning in this thing called life — or imposing one on it, really. And what better way is there to provide some insight into, some context around, the chaotic experiences of existence than by likening them to the highly rules-based and ritualistic interactions on the sportsfield?

You know the kind of thing. Our language is stuffed with these tropes. We toe the line when we subject ourselves to authority, like runners under starter’s orders on the track. We find ourselves on a sticky wicket, like a beleaguered batsman facing cricket balls bowled on a pitch that causes them to jump unpredictably, making the job risky and uncomfortable. We find the goalposts have been disconcertingly moved, just when we think we have our objectives all lined up like a footballer about to strike. And we are told, “it’s a marathon, not a sprint,” to illustrate the benefits of a long-term, patient approach rather than pursuing instant gratification.

Of course, sport is far from a universal language. Decades ago I had the unalloyed joy of toiling at an American megabank, like a tiny worker ant in a global ant farm. Every year we would crowd into the plush auditorium of London headquarters for our CEO to reveal the annual financial results to the rank and file. Imagine a couple of hundred British people in suits and ties and highly polished brogues staring at the massively magnified features of a complacent banker telling us from his desk in New York that in the coming year we must “point to the fences.”

On consulting a US colleague, we found out that ‘pointing to the fences’ is a reference to Babe Ruth, arguably the greatest baseball player of all time, whose prowess as a slugger he would underscore by pointing at precisely which outfield fence he intended to bash the ball over and register another home run. It’s a measure of the supreme confidence and technical ability that drove him to set a home-run record that stood until 1974.

It’s what you do upon ‘stepping up to the plate’ — another baseball reference which we non-yanks seem to have assimilated without being baffled but also without necessarily knowing where it came from. And our CEO wanted us to bring that superlative ability and self-belief to issuing bonds, syndicating loans, facilitating IPOs, and negotiating mergers and acquisitions.

To be perfectly frank, I think sports metaphors have even greater limitations than these cultural mismatches. For one thing, they are a hop, step and jump from becoming clichés. But I think the main reason is that they overstate the powers of sport. They make assumptions about sport’s qualities or powers that aren’t necessarily borne out in reality.

Take for example the cliché that the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton. In other words, the teamwork and discipline a bunch of toffs learnt playing rugby and cricket at England’s premier public school stood them in good stead when they went on to command the British Army against Napoleon. Well, teamwork is great in theory but more of a challenge to achieve in reality — certainly at my school, where sport established and reinforced a rigid social hierarchy based on physical ability. Showing up and trying hard got no kudos. And to judge by the current crop of Eton old boys in power right now in the UK, those toffs haven’t managed to live up to the ideal much either.

In fact, in the work arena, it’s my experience that ‘teamwork’ and ‘team player’ are terms deployed dishonestly by charlatans seeking to further their own distinctly individualistic ambitions. Just as patriotism is said to be the last refuge of the scoundrel, invoking the team ethic appears to be the last refuge of the upwardly managing sociopath.

Many of these ideals have their genesis in the late-Victorian era in Britain when these games were all emerging in the institutions that prepared the nation’s youth for roles in governing, administering or policing a sprawling imperial empire. Thus the stirring Vitae Lampada by Sir Henry Newbolt, where the schoolboy hero of a last-wicket stand subsequently applies his gritty qualities in a colonial skirmish:

The sand of the desert is sodden red-
Red with the wreck of the square that broke-
The gatling’s jammed and the colonel dead,
And the regiment blind with dust and smoke.
The river of death has brimmed its banks,
And England’s far and Honour a name,
But the voice of a schoolboy rallies the ranks-
“Play up! Play up! And play the game!”

To define this ideal of physical fitness combined with moral strength, British novelist and clergyman Charles Kingsley coined the term “Muscular Christianity” in the mid-19th century. Robber Baron Cecil Rhodes sought to propagate the ideal in the requirements for his eponymous scholarships. But like the Empire, the sporting rehearsal of idealistic virtue could not last at their zenith.

Thus the greatest team sport ever invented, cricket, has fallen short of its legendary status as epitomising fair play and gentlemanly conduct. We know it should be those things because anything that’s not is “just not cricket.” But recently that didn’t stop three Aussie national players — millionaire professionals bearing their country’s insignia — from plotting together to carry sandpaper onto the pitch, there to “alter the condition of the ball” so that it would reverse swing more readily. This is usually a difficult thing to achieve and serves to fox and fool the batsman just like a sticky wicket might.

The subsequent investigation revealed that this tawdry event was the culmination of years of what I like to call ‘sporting bullshittery’. This is the kind of rhetoric that cites the mythical virtues of sport to justify grubby behaviour — think rugby players justifying the odd sneaky punch in the scrum with “it’s a hard game and we play it hard.” Um, no, you just broke the rules.

In cricket’s case, the weasel words were (brace yourself) ‘headbutting the line’. The line is the rules; to win at cricket, these paragons of muscular christianity advocated aggressively testing the rules in ways that gave an edge over less committed players. When asked where this line might be, no-one was quite sure, but everyone said they knew it when they saw it. The problem was, self-defining your rules doesn’t work when there are 22 individuals on the pitch.

The sporting metaphor I think applies here is ‘playing tennis without a net’. Often attributed to former U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt, it describes a situation where, with no constraints or rules, the venture becomes pointless or lacking challenge. The rules are what gives sporting endeavour meaning. They provide the framework within which skill, enterprise and, yes, teamwork are tested fairly to discern a victor. You know — they provide a level playing field. Deciding which rules you can break just puts a torch to the net.

Anyway, the sandpaper example is still bitterly debated: the passions stirred by sports draw heavily on deep-rooted phenomena like nationalism and indeed ethnicity. Tricky stuff. Perhaps this is why sport is so often cited as a metaphor for life. People see the values they treasure being enacted in microcosm on the playing field. It’s not just about the scoreline — sport reaffirms that the rules we live by are the right ones.

So I’m going to venture off-piste here and suggest that sport is not so much an imperfect analogue for life as a too-perfect one. Just think about it: if we look to the virtues of physical endeavour to crystallise what matters most to us in life, we will inevitably fall short. The game has within it the possibility of perfection; life, on the other hand, is complex and messy. When we measure the imperfections of life against the game, we emphasise our fallibility by failing to shoot a perfect score.

So that millionaire banking CEO wasn’t rallying his team and inspiring us to aim higher so much as acknowledging that the game we were engaged in was less perfect than baseball can be. Sure, he wanted us to raise our game — but he knew we were mere flawed humans. Perhaps that is why he also said he loved us — all 300,000 of us. And in turn, we accepted that our true motivation to do better was the threat of redundancy if we dropped the ball, or a cash bonus if we knocked it out of the park.

That’s a much simpler set of rules to live by: survival of the fittest, the law of the jungle, dog eat dog. A less idealistic template for guiding our actions — and one that allows for the full scope of underhand, nefarious dodges known as cheating. It’s not cricket, but it’s authentic. On reflection, I’m not sure that’s preferable.