Chris Spice (crazy name, crazy guy), the former performance director of the Rugby Football Union, has doubtless just boosted his Christmas card count by having a pop not only at the “beleagured” (ie crap) England rugby coach Andy Robinson but the RFU itself.
In doing so, he’s dared to expose the very problem that plagues UK sport:
“Rather than relying on amateur committee men, there should be professionals in charge.”
Who are the top dogs of the Football Association, the England and Wales Cricket Board, UK Athletics, the Jockey Club (as was), the Rugby Football Union, the Lawn Tennis Association and all the other risibly self-important, self-appointed, self-regulated bodies who spend the money paying punters pump into British sport all year round? Everywhere you look in the higher echelons of British sport administration there are chinless grandees wearing blazers and club/old school ties and no apparent qualifications whatsoever for the jobs they are doing.
Say what you like about the FA Premier League (and I could say plenty about them), but they are professionals running a professional organization. They defend their clubs’ best interests and don’t mind get their hands dirty in the process.
In doing so, of course, they are sending smaller clubs to the wall, constantly draining the pool of homegrown talent and fucking up any chance the current generation of English players may ever once theoretically have had of winning an international tournament but you can’t help but admire what they have achieved commercially in just over a decade. They’ve turned a poor brand – top flight English football, plagued by the legacy of Heysel, Hillsborough and hooliganism – and made it the most popular and commercially successful (though certainly not the best) football league in the world.
Paula Radcliffe finally got sick and tired of coming fourth, opted out of the established British way of training, surrounded herself with a team of dedicated professionals and has become one of the country’s few genuine sporting success stories in the process.
If some other sporting bodies behaved half as professionally, we might actually win the odd gong instead of devoting acres of newsprint to Why Are We So Poor At [Cricket/Rugby/Football/Tennis] When We Invented The Bloody Sport? articles.
The Corinthians don’t participate in the FA Cup anymore and it’s about time people woke up to that fact if they want this country to enjoy serious sporting success in the way that, for example, Australia has over the past 15 years.