Joe Root’s response to homophobia was not heroic – it only shows how low our expectations are

For an England captain to gain plaudits for something so perfunctory is a statement about just how broken sport really is

‘Leader does what leaders do’ shouldn’t be a sporting headline in 2019 (AP)

I am going to get this out of the way and say I am grateful to Joe Root for his simple, swift and to the point retort to an alleged homophobic “sledging”.

I could write an article on “sledging” and “banter” and all the other ways sport actively encourages language that minimises and obfuscates abuse.

However, there’s a problem in sport and with the response to Joe Root’s retort, and it’s a problem that exacerbates homophobia, misogyny, racism and every other of sport’s many ills.

I’ve heard people in the media refer to Root’s comment as “essentially a landmark moment in cricket” and numerous others on Twitter showering praise on him, cricket and sport more roundly. Yet I find myself frustrated at this whole affair.

I know people will find this ungrateful, but if responding to a homophobic comment with “there’s nothing wrong with being gay” is a headline, then that same headline should go to the numerous primary school children who respond just so every week to classmates, parents and even passers-by on the street.

For this to be seen as a “landmark moment”, for a named-leader – an England captain – to gain plaudits for something so perfunctory is a statement about just how broken we know sport really is.

Sports fans and the media shower Root’s retort with champagne, as if a sportsperson saying something most parents would see simply as a sign of ordinary civility in their children, somehow shatters a pink ceiling in a sport without a single out player in the elite men’s game.

“There’s nothing wrong with being gay” is the kind of measured response to homophobia I would expect from any professional in their workplace. It is the very least I should expect from a man who is captain of a team that represents a nation.

I know people will find this ungrateful, and I do appreciate what Root did, however the sports business is one area where they’ve perfected over-promising and under-delivering and no one seems to have noticed. Many in the media fawn at the vaguest hint of a sport living up to their own press; fans often seem too easily placated by tiny gestures as if they’ve already binged on the sporting kool-aid.

The terminally low bar set for sport allows it to appear charmingly hapless when it (so often) fails to live up to its loudly promised principles. Equally, sport gets to give the impression of epic magnanimity while doing nothing more than we should expect of anyone remotely civil. It gets a pass both ways – never really delivering on much needed change on important social issues and never becoming the vanguard for change society needs now more than ever.

I can’t emphasise enough that I think what Joe Root did the right thing – though I fear this won’t satisfy the social media trolls – but we must consider the implications of a sport’s place in society that something so appropriate, yet unexceptional can been seen by so many as so extraordinary as to be not just praise-worthy, but newsworthy.

If doing something so abjectly ordinary can get you glorified, the baseline standard is too low.

I say again, I’m glad Joe Root did what he did, but this mutual masturbation-fest over a sporting leader doing precisely nothing more than what sporting leaders are supposed to do encourages self-congratulation without the requisite work and all of us should question our part in it.

We need to ask ourselves, is it our love of sport, or just our accurate insight into its true nature that makes one man’s fitting response to abuse seem so conspicuously remarkable?

If we want sport to live up to its promises, we need to raise our expectations.

Let’s face it - “Leader does what leaders do” shouldn’t be a sporting headline in 2019.

John Amaechi is a psychologist