SOME of my best friends are accountants.  OK, so I have some friends who are accountants, but they’re not my best friends.  OK, so they’re more like acquaintances.
As the old joke goes, accountants in general are renowned for using their personality as birth control.  But what does all this have to do with sport?  My wife’s company had a team in one of those rah-rah-team building corporate sports events recently.
They did extremely well in one race, thrashing a team of accountants, who promptly used a technicality to have them disqualified.  Like most of those corporate rah-rahs, it was a fun event, with just enough competitive streak in the quest for the plastic trophy.
Someone forgot to tell the humourless accountants, who despite getting beaten like bad dogs, chose to hone in on a dubious technicality to thieve the win.  
As the old rule says, if you can’t win fair and square, steal it.  
Often technicalities are used when the team hasn’t done the job.  A mate (not an accountant) was telling me on Saturday of a case where his rugby side had attempted to register a recently-returned player in time for the semi-finals series.
They did everything right, but a rival club challenged the registration on the grounds the player had not played during the regular season.  There was no rule for this.  Instead of using common sense and saying, “he’s registered, that’s that”, the rugby union in question is now having a meeting to decide whether they need a rule.  Semi-finals are this weekend, and it’s likely the initiating club will be doing everything possible to put further roadblocks and appeals in the way.
We have to have rules, or we’d descend into anarchy.  Nevertheless, rules can often dominate what is supposed to be a contest between individuals or teams.
After every rugby Test we have a number of articles on the referee’s rulings.  Consistency in scrum and tackle laws varies from referee to referee.  The football World Cup illustrated a similar inconsistency in applying that sport’s laws from team to team and game to game.
Those issues are something that the players have to deal with at the time.  They have to quickly adapt to the referee and alter their game plan accordingly if needed.
It’s the rules that bring on those damned technicalities that frustrate.  A few years ago I was managing a team that was beaten by 41 points in a sudden death rugby semi-final.  After the game, some bloke I vaguely knew from our club came rushing up and said he thought one of the opposition’s players was still banned for a fighting incident some weeks prior.
Take one player out of a squad of 22 and it’s still not going to change the fact we needed to score six converted tries to win the game.  I quietly let it drop.  But I know of other managers who would have been laying a complaint straight away.
I’m the first to be blinded by allegiance and to want to win at all costs.  But dragging out the rulebook just doesn’t cut it unless there has been some gross breach that must be remedied.
The other aspect is that there is a time and a place for exercising the laws.  As the accountants showed above, they may have won on a technicality, but they still lost on the track and lost goodwill.
Sport should be about the contest on the field, the track, or wherever.  It shouldn’t be about litigation.  Why do you think so many people can’t be bothered with the Americas Cup?