Is it ever OK to laugh at a footballer scoring three own goals?

In her book entitled Schadenfreude: The Joy of Another’s Misfortune, the author and academic Dr Tiffany Watt Smith argues that it is “part of how we cope with inferiority or our own failures”. She and others view it as a natural reaction. A study by the psychologist Mirella Manfredi from the University of Milano-Bicocca illustrated that your brain has decided you are going to laugh at, say, someone tripping over or even scoring three own goals in a football match whether you like it or not.

The latter happened to the New Zealand Women’s centre-back Meikayla Moore in the first half of their game with the Unites States in the SheBelieves Cup this week. A perfect hat-trick. As it turns out only one of them – the third – approached anything close to Jamie Pollock levels of hilarity. The others were just a bit unlucky – but nevertheless it is quite the achievement.

“A hat-trick of own goals. This is tremendous.” I tweeted. It didn’t go viral, I was a little behind. I didn’t come up with anything clever – such as Adam Hurrey’s “Does the match ball get to put her on its mantelpiece?”

Not everyone, however, found it funny. One correspondent quote-tweeted my post with the response: “Imagine suffering what is probably the worst day of your career and having people tweet about how tremendous it is for clicks. Expected better from you @maxrushden that player might well be in a dark place today. #BeKind #DoBetter”

My instant reaction to this was scorn. No one likes being told they’re wrong or unkind. No one likes being patronised to hashtag do better. Elite sport is brutal. There is no place to hide. People choose to do it. And it’s only a game. But did he have a point?

Clearly it wasn’t “tremendous” for the player. I hadn’t even