LTA Mediocrity

Neil Harman writes in The Times (21/09/09) of the LTA, ‘Mediocrity in leadership, mediocrity in playing strength, mediocrity in coaching, the first murmurs of a grassroots uprising. Such is the disturbing landscape that confronts British tennis”Andy Murray confirms this assessment with the withering conclusion; ‘We are where we deserve to be.” Harman continues, ‘How is it that, with such largesse at their disposal year upon year from Wimbledon’s unparalleled success, Britain’s (tennis) decline appears unstoppable. Read More…

Football Old Farts

We’ve seen where it leads in the financial world. ‘Light touch regulation’, the catch phrase for the Blair/Brown Labour administration for the past twelve years, has seen the so called Masters of the Universe plunder us mere mortals for all they could, and in the process very nearly bringing the entire rotten edifice crashing to the ground. Hundreds of millions of workers around the globe have lost their livelihoods because of the unrestrained greed of the corporate banking sector and in Britain, as elsewhere; public services will be squeezed in order to pay for the gigantic public bailouts.

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Cheating Neanderthals

In the space of just a couple of weeks three articles appeared in the press devoted entirely to the subject of cheating. I should add as a point of clarification, that we are talking both sport and the company boardrooms; the inner citadels of the banking world and the committee rooms of parliament. In short, humans seem to be genetically programmed to lie and cheat if it means we can get one step ahead of our competitors. ‘Social morality, individual conscience and the rule of law are in there somewhere, but they invariably seem to play second fiddle when status and fortune are on the table. Read More…

Chelsea Child Poachers

The headlines say it all. ‘Beware Child Poachers’, screams the Daily Mail. The day before the same paper was content with the single word, ‘Thieves!’. An excellent piece by Des Kelly with the heading, ‘English Prints All Over Stolen Goods.’ The Sun ran with the same single word headline as The Mail and then followed it up with, ‘Justice At Last – You’ve had this coming to you Chelsea.’ The Times kept up the pressure with the headline, ‘Big Game Poachers Prey on Youth’, while The Observer ran with two stories entitled, ‘Cash Cow Turns Rustlers’ and an in-depth article about the Chelsea Youth team under the banner; ‘The Tainted Team’.

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Bloodgate – A Sporting Tale for the 21st Century.

Here is a classic Shakespearean tale of the heroic but fatally flawed protagonist who is destined to fall from grace, set against the backdrop of turbulent and uncertain times. Dean Richards, better known to his adoring public as Deano, is that man. Tens of thousands of words have already been amassed in charting his spectacular fall from grace so there is no need to retread that path. More useful to explore the turbulent and uncertain times of Rugby Union itself, yet another sport I confess to knowing precious little about, than pillorying the fallen one any further. Why kick a man when he’s already down in the gutter. Read More…

Knocking the LTA

Knocking the LTA has almost become a sport in itself. It’s an easy target of course. In reality they are probably no less effective than most of the other governing bodies in this country but they do have considerably more resources at their disposal than most of their sporting colleagues, and that is the rub. Whereas their colleagues can cry poverty the LTA cannot. ”Criticisms of the LTA come in two main varieties. Variety one: they just can’t seem to produce champions despite their bucket loads of dosh.

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The Dialectics of Sport

The central contradiction at the heart of sport is obvious enough. It is the human dialectic: ruthlessly individualistic, tribal and competitive on the one hand, sublimely humanistic and socially co-operative on the other. Sport relentlessly reflects both poles. Today sport is nothing but a dirty commodity where clubs and athletes are bought and sold like prize cattle. Cheating, match fixing, drug taking, ruthless commercialism and of course the ugly local tribalism and national triumphalism are all the daily fare of the sporting world. Yet almost bizarrely, sport simultaneously offers the opportunity of individual personal growth, local community cohesion and on the international stage, improved global harmony.

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Come On – Be A Sport, Linda Whitney, London Evening Standard

It was a particularly dispiriting article that I’m sure had the opposite intention. Linda Whitney had set out to show how sport is growing as an industry and consequently so are the number and range of jobs involved in sport. Whitney talks about receptionists, catering and leisure centre instructors starting at around 13,000 and then working your way up the ladder to managerial positions in marketing or design on 50,000 plus. It all sounds very enticing. Whitney then explains, The sports world is becoming more professionalized, so employers are willing to take on candidates from other sectors providing they have the right skills.

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John Terry, bent horse racing, and other sporting delights

If July 2009 had a dialectical sporting theme it was that of sporting decency battling against the baser instincts of man: cheating, lying and grubby double dealing. On the one hand there was Bobby Robson who was universally acclaimed by all sections of the media as an all round decent guy who combined a huge dollop of sporting success with the demeanour of a working class gentleman. On the other hand there was John Terry, bent horse racing, nastiness between Tour de France champions and ex champions, dodgy swim suits, claims of time wasting in the Ashes, failed dope tests in the Caribbean and less than courteous mind games flying around Manchester. Read More…

Bernie Ecclestone

Let me start off by saying I know nothing about F1 racing and its supposed attraction to millions of people world wide. For that matter, I know nothing about racing of any description, be it cars, bikes, horses, dogs or humans. I did absentmindedly visit a greyhound evening once in a country town in Australia a few decades ago, and the only two things I can remember is of getting quickly bored and a feeling that an element of animal cruelty was somehow involved, though on this second point I remain open-minded.

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Old School Tie – David Conn on English Cricket

A useful piece by David Conn in the Guardian shows how English cricket is still rooted in the public school mentality of the past two centuries. Seven of the current English Ashes squad can boast ‘independent school status’ and the attempts of the ECB to widen the appeal of cricket are far from certain to succeed. Conn cites Graham Able, a trustee of the cricket Foundation, who as Master of Dulwich College in South London, can boast eight full grass cricket fields which is two more than ‘exist for the whole borough of Southwark where only one state school can offer a grass cricket field for its students.

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Lord of the Rings, Andrew Anthony

This was not the first and it definitely will not be the last, but Andrew Anthony has produced a thought provoking assessment of Lord Sebastian Newbold Coe, Knight of the British Empire, twice Olympic 1,5000m winner, former Tory MP and advisor to William Hague, and current Chairman of the London Organising Committee of the 2012 Olympic Games. That’s quite a title. Anthony’s article is good because it throws up all the usual ambiguities and paradoxes surrounding not just the London Olympics but all modern Olympic jamborees.

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The Damned United

I would imagine that most sports fanatics, and especially football fans of all descriptions, would have clocked this film many months ago. I, for some inexplicable reason had not, so I had the immense pleasure of viewing this cleverly constructed documentary/drama without the surrounding hype and without any preconceived expectations. If there are any of you out there in the blogsphere who have not yet seen this little gem, I can say without the slightest reservation that in all departments; acting, production and direction, this is a must see film classic.

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Cloud of Suspicion, Anna Kessel in the Guardian

We all like fairytales. They brighten up the all too often grim business of life. We know what we are buying into but the alternative of a world without fantasy is too cold to contemplate. So every four years when world records are broken at the Olympic Games or at the world championships of each sport, we prefer to believe at that moment that the race was clean, the record will stand and the athlete has played by the rules. Days, weeks and sometimes months later the bubble is burst and revelations of illegal substance in the urine make the headlines. It’s happens all too often yet still we crave the fairytale ending and so we tell ourselves its just a few bad apples. Read More…

Sport As The New Religion

The world is coming together. Not in some utopian sense that I imagined in my communist youth. Nor is it coming together willingly, enthusiastically or in any sense, in a planned way. But coming together it surely is albeit kicking and screaming like a child being forced to go to school for the first time. Still clinging on to the old myths and institutions of nation, religion and race, yet day by day at exponential rate, the world is becoming one entity. Hooray! The process may take another hundred years to solidify and maybe a few more centuries to fully mature but what are a few hundred years compared to the millennia that have already passed in the human story. Read More…

Britain’s Tennis Superbrats

This dispiriting article detailing the bullying culture on the junior tennis circuit would make an excellent appendix to Joe Humphries, Foul Play ( see book reviews ). Just to give you a flavour of the piece Pearson laments, We are at the Lawn Tennis Association junior tennis tour, where cheating and rows have become so commonplace that the former British No 1, Annabel Croft, has withdrawn her 15 year-old daughter from the tour and the former world No 5, Jo Durie, has said she wouldn’t be surprised if someone was knifed at a tournament. Read More…

Kelly is a true Brit

After decades of the incessant drip drip drip of Daily Mail little england bile, it was a wonderful surprise to cast my eye across Patrick Collins headline, Ignore this vile abuse, Kelly is a true Brit. And when I got round to reading the article it was every bit as cheering as the headline itself. The vile abuse that Collins refers to derived from a one Andrew Brons, a leading light in the British National Party, who we learn, chalked up nearly 10% of the vote in the Yorkshire and Humber Region, thus earning this arch racist Europhobe a lucrative seat as an MEP.

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Keane: The Autobiography

Roy Keane’s Autobiography is a great read. Whether that is down to the journalistic skill of the ghost writer, Eamon Dunphy, or simply that Keane has a great story to tell, is not clear. Either way I felt somewhat mesmerised by his footballing life and I can only hope there is a volume two to come. Keane’s story oozes with painful contradictory pulses; between the desire for fame and the desire for privacy, between the cravings to play beautiful football and the need quite often to deliver brute force, between the temptation to play the playboy and the desire for a quiet family life, and of course, between the demands of team discipline and the urges of individual spontaneity.

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Tony Blair’s Sporting intervention: The Gimmick goes International

From the man who gave us an illegal war in Iraq under the patently false pretext of ridding that country of weapons of mass destruction and resulting in an estimated half a million Iraqi deaths, comes ‘Beyond Sport’, one of those slick Tony Blair initiatives for, ‘promoting sport as a tool for social development and conflict resolution.’ The audacious hypocrisy of the man! With his neo-con mates in the Bush regime he turned the brutal but secular Iraq into an international base for Islamic fundamentalists and in true Anglo Saxon form, sought to rule the resources of the country by turning Shia against Sunni, community against community, Iraqi against Iraqi.

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Has football now lost touch with reality? James Olley, Evening Standard

Three cheers for the London Evening Standard. I never thought I’d find myself writing that, but finally a mainstream newspaper has dared to say what most sane people already surely think. £80 million for one footballer when vast sectors of the world’s population are hovering on the edge of subsistence is surely a football obscenity too far. James Olley explains, These almost incomprehensible figures have understandably prompted widespread condemnation at a time when fans are being asked to pay more than ever before to see their team against a turbulent backdrop of the current global financial crisis.

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Professional Football – Will the Bubble Burst?

Four interrelated stories concerning the financial state of English football suggest that English professional football may be heading the same way as the British banking sector. Are we talking millions? No, we are talking billions. David Conn of the Guardian estimates the English Premier League has accumulated over ‘3 billion worth of debts. Chelsea, Manchester United are in the worst shape but Liverpool are on the ropes as well. Every single club is carrying debt and with the wages bill set to escalate even further the debt can only get worse. The irony is that Man United and Liverpool are making a profit but are ending up as loss making concerns because of the interest they must pay on their debt. ( The Guardian, 3/06/09 )

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