Goodbye and Thank You, Seba

Laziness is a character defect. Fixing your personality is much more difficult than improving your technique in shooting, passing, trapping or any particular aspect of your game. This is even more so if you’re not inclined to put effort into doing so in the first place. Maybe the “talented, but lazy” player has more potential overall, but if he’s truly lazy, we’ll never see it, because reaching his full potential would require hard work, and that’s not going to happen.

Also, there’s a difference between lazy play, and smart and efficient play. The former is just not putting the effort in and implies nothing about how intelligently you’re playing the game. Intelligent play sometimes requires putting in a big effort. For example, if you’re a team with a lot of speed in attack compared to the other team’s defense, a lot of running around nonstop can be exactly the right strategic approach to the game. A lazy player who refuses to put in that effort would be playing stupidly. Or maybe your best strategy is to send multiple players on runs off the ball and allow your creative midfielder to pick the best option. A lazy player who doesn’t sell his run is playing stupidly and defeating your teams best strategy.

As for why we care, isn’t it obvious? Here’s a metaphor. Let’s say you and I are building a cabin in the woods and we’re trying to get done before winter comes so we don’t freeze to death. Let’s also suppose that I’m twice as capable as you, so if we both worked equally hard, I’d get twice as much done as you. So let’s say you can do 100 units of work a day and I can do 200. But I decide that I’m going to peg my workrate to yours, so I’m going to put in 50% effort and only do 100 units a day. We’re giving up 1/3 of our productivity each day and making the work take that much longer, threatening both of us. However, by your standard, you don’t have any right to complain, because I’m giving you equal value. If winter overtakes us and we both die, we’re both equally culpable because we put in equal work. Or do you think you’d feel aggrieved, knowing that, if I cared enough to put in my full effort, we could have completed 50% more work each day and have been that much more likely to finish the cabin in time and live to see another spring?

In the case of team sports, the shared goal isn’t quite as dramatic as avoiding death, but it’s still there: we want to win championships. I’ve given you a concrete example of a situation where Le Toux’s willingness to work hard led directly to a goal scoring play, that led directly to a trophy. If that lazy player would give you 100%, you’d have a better chance of turning some of your losses into draws and some of your draws into wins. But he’s not, he’s content to let you draw games you could have won and lose games you could have drawn. He’s willing to throw opportunities for success out the window because he can’t bring himself to care enough to put in a full effort.