Category Archives: sport

Just no. No. Got it? No. That’s no.

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Members of the European Parliament are backing calls to fly the EU’s blue flag with yellow stars at sporting events, such as Wimbledon, held in its territory and, most controversially, to have the EU emblem on national team shirts.


The proposals, to be released next week, stipulate that all national sports teams, including football, rugby, cricket and the British Olympic team, would be forced to have the EU emblem appear on their jerseys.

Oh, can you not please fuck off?

The idea – dismissed by the Tories as “simply daft” – is contained in a report on “The European Dimension in Sport”, drafted by Spanish centre-right MEP Santiago Fisas Ayxela which will be presented to the Parliament next week.


A European Commission source said the executive is keen to promote the ‘European dimension’ in sport and could bring forward the idea but only with full agreement with the competent national bodies.

Well, given the Tories’ form in this area, we can expect pressure to be brought to bear on the FA, RFU, ECB, UK Athletics and everyone else to wear the shitty little patch on the shirts and vests before the summer is out then.

Saying ‘in Europe, but not run by Europe’ is like saying ‘in a lab contaminated by a rampant flesh eating virus that causes death on a biblical scale within three hours, but not infected by a rampant flesh eating virus that causes death on a biblical scale within three hours.’

Can we leave yet?

Leave it to the governing bodies.

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For what it is worth, I think the ICC got it spot on with the suspensions handed down to the three Pakistani cricketers who indulged in a bit of spot fixing during their tour of England over the summer. Had the three (and the agent) been involved in fixing the outcome of the match, then I would have expected to see life bans handed down.

It is very easy to criticise the governing bodies of sport, it is also usually justified. The governing body of cycling, the UCI, have been pretty ineffective in tackling the performance enhancing drug abuse which seems to be running rampant through the sport. Alberto Contador, who won le Tour last year, is the latest high profile case to fall foul of the doping regulations, with the usual claims of accidental contamination. Another big name from the sport, Floyd Landis, who has held his hands up to the offence has also implicated the absolute biggest name in the history of the sport, Lance Armstrong in the same.

I’m not about to defame Contador here, it may be that his protestations of innocence are credible, certainly from the amounts declared it would appear that if you want to be a top class athlete you also need to be a food scientist.

The football world in the UK is scratching its head at the fine of £25,000 imposed on Blackpool for fielding a ‘weakened’ team in a match against Aston Villa in the Premier League in November. Blackpool’s entertaining manager, Ian Holloway, said at the time that if the club were fined for making ten changes to their team, then he’d resign. The situation is a farce. At the start of the season, each Premier League club is instructed to submit a squad of 25 players for registration in the competition (excluding players under the age of 21, who can be, but do not have to be registered). One would have thought that having submitted that squad, each manager is then free to pick whichever 11 players he sees fit. So Holloway has registered his squad, picked his eleven, all from the registered squad and has seen his club fined by some administrators who obviously think that they are more qualified to pick his team than he is. The irony is that the ‘big’ clubs, the Manchester Uniteds and Chelseas of the league will regularly make large changes to teams in the games immediately before Champions League fixtures, when facing smaller opposition in the FA cup and will stick out a team comprised completely of reserve, youth team and very occasional first team players in the League Cup. Has the FA ever fined them? No. They wouldn’t dare.

It is an unfortunate truth that the ICC have marked themselves out as being the exception rather than the rule. In most other sports, the governing bodies quake at the thought of rapping the big clubs and names over the knuckles, and as a result sanctions that they hand out are uneven and inconsistent. By handing out 5 year bans to Butt and Asif, the ICC have shown no such fear in the face of two of the most established stars in the game.

But there’s a problem, sport is popular, so the authorities can’t help getting involved in it. Just because it is popular, they make the mistake of thinking it is important. So we see stories like this:

The Football Association say there is “no justification” for direct Government intervention into the governance of the game and have warned their organisation could face FIFA sanctions if politicians overstepped the mark.

The comments, made in written evidence from the FA to the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee inquiry into football governance, follow comments from sports minister Hugh Robertson, who described football as the “worst governed” sport in Britain.

Which is kind of like Charlie Kennedy berating the pub industry for taking one or two too many drinks. There simply is no justification for politicians to get involved here, and given the track records of politicians any intervention from them would increase costs, expand red tape and ensure the sport is even worse governed. It is what politicians do.

It is also the CPS getting involved as well.

Prosecutors in Britain announced on Friday that batsman Butt and seamers Amir and Asif would face criminal charges over their part in last year’s alleged spot-fixing scandal, specifically over their actions in the fourth Test at Lord’s.

Why? No-one has been injured here. The result of the match was unaffected and the noises about spot fixing in the game in the sub-continent have been running for so long that any punter who stuck a few quid on anything beyond the final result is a fool or in on it. Likewise the bookies who took such a bet need to take a look at themselves for being so credulous.

The three Pakistani cricketers are in Pakistan, a country we have no extradition treaty with, so any attempt to get them back to the UK if they don’t surrender themselves would be very expensive and probably fruitless, that, coupled with the expense of trial and imprisonment, means that surely a prosecution just isn’t in the public interest.

The ICC have shown that governing bodies are perfectly capable of administering their own kingdoms without ‘help’ from the politicians or apparatus of state. The politicians would do well to realise this and back off. We need to cut back areas of life where they are involved, not to increase them. 

And on the pedestal these words appear. . .

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You worked hard and saved your money. You’d been aware for a little while that you’d outgrown your current home, it didn’t have the facilities you need, it was getting a bit creaky and was a little cramped. You’d found out about a new house that had been built on the other side of town. The previous owners had only used it for a couple of weeks before they realised that they didn’t really need it anymore and couldn’t afford to run it.

Granted the new house was a good distance from your traditional home and wasn’t in the best area of town, plus it certainly wasn’t cheap, but it fitted the bill. You were just about to finalise the deal when the current owner said ‘I know you’re paying a lot of money for this place, but even though you’re buying it, you’re not allowed to change any of the decoration, you can’t put up that conservatory you were thinking about and three or four times a year you and your family have to get out of the house for the night so my friends and I can have a dinner party in your dining room.’

As a result, you walk away and the current owner still has this huge house on his hands. He doesn’t live there, the lights are turned off most nights and the bill to stop the house falling into disrepair slowly bankrupts him. The house is very high cost and as it isn’t being looked after, it becomes a risk to the public who have to pour money in to stop it falling onto neighbouring properties. The current owner is now quite happy, the public pay for the upkeep, don’t change the wallpaper and still let him have his dinner parties.

What am I going on about?

The Olympic Stadium, of course.

Tottenham Hotspur have been looking at taking the site over once the games are finished. White Hart Lane just isn’t suitable for a Champions League calibre club any more, and the Olympic Stadium was one of the options they were looking at. To be fair to Spurs, they’ve also got plans for a new ground adjacent to their current site which are quite advanced, but as a sensible business, they’ve looked around to explore all options.

For what it is worth, I don’t think a move to East London is a good idea for Spurs. You can’t just uproot a club from one area of town and drop them in another, especially when the area they would be going to has their own very well established club, who are a huge part of the fabric of that area of town and also have designs on the stadium themselves.

This is ridiculous though:

Tottenham’s proposal to take over London’s Olympic Stadium with AEG after the Games in 2012 is “completely unacceptable” to UK Athletics (UKA).

Along with West Ham, Spurs have been named as a preferred bidder, but their plan to “rip up the athletics track” is anathema to UKA chairman Ed Warner.

“It is [essential] for Tottenham and AEG to go back to the original promise made in 2005,” Warner told BBC Sport.

“That was about UK Athletics being at the heart of the Olympic Park.” 

Well, if you want to be at the heart of it, then you pay for it chum. Don’t be selling it off to the highest bidder and then demanding that they accommodate you. It doesn’t work like that.

This is an 80,000 seater stadium, that will make it the third largest stadium in England, not even Manchester United have a stadium that big. Spurs themselves are talking about reducing the capacity by 20,000.

What’s the issue here? Why can’t they just play behind the athletics track? Because put simply, an athletics track is deadly to the atmosphere in a football stadium. Supporters of both Juventus and Torino hated the lavish Stadio delle Alpi in Turin when they played there as it put the support miles away from the pitch and the atmosphere dissipates into the air. Espanyol, who played at the Olympic Stadium in Barcelona have recently moved into their own gaff and are much much happier to have the running track gone. Bayern and 1860 Munich were also delighted to leave the bizarre Olympiastadion in the city for the purpose built Allianz Arena, although it has worked out less well for 1860 who are still tenants.

Running tracks around football pitches just don’t work.

You may hate football, but I would still suggest you’d recognise the ridiculous situation whereby someone buys a property for their own use, only for the previous users to impose conditions of use once the sale has gone through.

Why don’t UK Athletics just use the site themselves? Because they just cannot afford it. The current ‘home’ of athletics in this country, Crystal Palace (National Sports Centre) has a capacity of 15,000 which can be extended to 24,000 with temporary seating. How often is it used? Not very. With the AAA championships, occasional Grand Prixs, the Diamond League meeting and if they are lucky the very occasional European and or World Cup, probably about eight to ten times a year where they have the prospect of having anything approaching a decent crowd. Running a stadium is an expensive business, and with such a paltry selection of events, there’s no way they can break even, let alone turn a profit. The Diamond League is the closest thing to the Olympic games, the world’s top performers meet up to compete out of their national vests. I can’t find the attendance figures for the Crystal Palace meet, but I’d be amazed if it played to a full house of 24,000, athletics just isn’t a big draw. Everyone’s interest peaks once every four years but after that it slides back into obscurity behind both rugby codes, cricket and the behemoth that is football.

We hear a lot about ‘legacy’. Well I’m afraid the legacy will be a parade of barely used sporting facilities which will never again experience the glory of the olympics. Without Spurs, or more likely West Ham, taking over the stadium, the people of Stratford will be left with a huge stadium which sits empty. West Ham seem to be accepting of the idea of a running track, but I’ll tell you this, their passionate support will not like it one iota, and they will not be shy in letting Sullivan and Gould (the club’s owners) know that the track has to go.

If neither club moves in, who do you think will pick up the tab?

Let’s just see what has happened to the stadia for the last few Olympic Games:

2008 – Beijing – Recently used as a snow theme park – plans to turn it into a shopping and entertainment complex. – White elephant.

2004 – Athens – Sometime home to Panathinaikos, AEK Athens and Athens 2004 football clubs. Occasional atheltics use.

2000 – Sydney – Athletics track removed, used for soccer, rugby, Aussie rules and cricket. No call for huge atheltics stadium.

1996 – Atlanta – Atheltics track removed, renamed Turner Field, now baseball specific stadium for the Atlanta Braves. – No call for huge atheltics stadium.

1992 – Barcelona – Now lying empty following the departure of RCD Espanyol, hosted the 2010 European Athletics Championships to very sparse crowds. – White elephant.

In every case they have either been reconfigured, because once the games have gone they just don’t need a 60,000 + seater athletics stadium, or it sits as an empty venue which is used occasionally and without  success.

The legacy of the olympic games will be a huge white elephant, soaking up millions of tax payers’ money and standing as a monument to the hubris and vanity of the politicians and athletics administrators.

My name is Ozymandias, King of kings: Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!

The One That Is Shouting ‘Run, You Buggers! RUN!’ . . .

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Right folks, just sit back, close your eyes and breathe in deeply through your nose.

Smell that?

Mmmmmm. Me too, don’t you just love the smell of cretinous mongtard in the morning?

Yes, Sir Liam Donaldson is at it again.

Schoolchildren could face annual fitness tests under plans laid out by the Government’s chief medical officer.

Sir Liam Donaldson wants pupils to undergo “bleep tests” – similar to schemes already running in California and Texas – to help increase fitness levels.

That’s a good idea. Perhaps we should install telescreens in everyone’s house, then we can have compulsory aerobic sessions in the mornings.

How about some Sokol gymnastics? Or the sort of mass gymnastic demonstrations so beloved of the Communist bloc?

It just goes to show that politicans have no concept of the connection between the decisions they make and policies they implement and the end results.

In the last thirteen years we’ve seen widespread sale of playing fields, a culture of fear that tells us there’s a paedo hiding in the bushes of every park and the obligation for anyone that wants to volunteer to set up kids’ sporting clubs to undergo the macro-examination of their lives because they’re bound to be kiddy fiddlers as well.

Surprisingly, and you yourself would be a racist paedophile to make any connection between the policies and the results, children in this country have never been less fit.

It isn’t the Government’s fault, oh no. It’s the fault of the parents who are scared to let the kids out of the house, or must seem so bloody precious about being screened, to those doing the screening, before they can work with the kids. The ‘authorities’ really do believe it is they who look after the best interests of the kids, rather than those who get of their arses and actually do it.

So how will this work?

The bleep test involves running between two markers laid out 20 metres apart. The child must run from one marker to the other before a beep sounds.

Must run? Or what? Will they be taken into care?

Actually, that’s not funny, as it probably isn’t too far from the truth.

And how will this test be administered? No doubt in some school hall in front of the whole school, where the less fit kids will waddle valiantly between the markers whilst their fitter classmates hoot with derision. Oh, the scope for bullying will be almost boundless.

And how will the kids who fail this test (Is this allowed? Or will they just be given a grade C?) improve their level of fitness? Will they magically be given time on the playing fields the schools had to sell to build houses on during PE lessons that they don’t have anymore because they’re having lessons on diversity, citizenship, Africa and global warming?

It really does beggar belief. We are allowed no responsibility for ourselves, unless we find ourselves disadvantaged because of the things that have been ripped from us, then it is all our fault.

The One That Is Rounding Up. . .

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A few little things which have flashed across my radar screen over the last couple of days.

Firstly, I was very sad to hear of the death of the Georgian luger yesterday. Apparently the sliding track at Whistler has the reputation of being the fastest in the world, and one of the more dangerous. There have been a few grumbles that the teams haven’t have had as much practice time on the track as they would have liked. That practice time wouldn’t have made any difference, despite the best efforts of the organisers to make the track as safe as possible, this accident happened on a corner which no-one expected to be dangerous.

Of course danger is a relative term when you look at sporting events like the luge, skeleton and bob. They are three, frankly, ridiculous sports and not ones that I personally can get excited about, but every competitor knows that when they step onto the ice, there is a very real risk of serious injury or death and damn do I respect their guts.

Secondly, a suggestion was made by a friend of mine that if the three disgraced proto-criminal MPs do use the parliamentary privilege defence when they pitch up in court, they should also be charged with incitement to riot and revolution. That sounds like a fine suggestion to me.

Thirdly, I was going to make a point about the futility of these body scanners (which I hate) at the airports if the PC brigade bring their illogical pressure to bear over the religious sensibilities of Islam, but Leg-Iron has beaten me to it, and does it better than I ever could.

Finally, Leona Lewis who won Britian Has The X-Factor and Talent in Amounts That Would Have Made a 1970′s One Hit Wonder Vomit Through Laughter, has proved herself to be a true diva by stamping her little foot over the choice of the food at the forthcoming Brit awards. Well, Fiona, or what ever your name is, you could always have chosen not to have eaten it, y’know.

How sad that the younger generation in this country see the option of bans as a proportionate and primary response to things that they have objections to. I have no strong feelings on the subject of foie-gras, there are just so many more important things to worry about. But when you go around trying to institute bans on things, don’t come weeping to me when something you want to do, eat, say, practice or belive is banned, you’ve brought it upon yourself.

The One That Is Talking About Tennis. . .

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I don’t normally talk about sport, but in general, I’m a fan. A huge fan of a couple of sports, a holder of a passing interest in others and very little interest in the rest.

Tennis falls into the latter category for me. I’m not going to rant on about use of licence payers’ money on Nanny Beeb’s coverage. Wimbledon is one of the global flagship annual sporting events, it is unique and occupies a very important spot in the sporting canon.

For two weeks a large number of people will have their gaze firmly focused on SW19, a good proportion of them will be watching the only sporting event which does hold any interest for them.

I’m watching the news right now, and there’s a good demonstration of our fourth ranked national sport. This is the list:

1. Football
2. Cricket
3. Rubgy
4. Wringing hands and wondering why we are so utterly, uselessly, pathetic at tennis.

I’ll tell you why.

Firstly, no-one cares about tennis in the country except for these two weeks. The interest just isn’t there.

‘Hang on, Wolfers,’ I hear you say, ‘there are X hundred thousand people who play tennis every year.’ And that’s fine, but how many people actually play, rather than tonking a ball about once a year on the concrete at Butlins? Yes, there are a lot of clubs, and the cry goes out that the kids have to get a crack at these clubs.

Every year a lot of very important people, wearing very important blazers, with very important club crests, set off with nice ties that make them look very important indeed, get together. Every year it is the same, these kids have got to be brought into the clubs and given that training. Every year they make the same resolutions and every year they go back to their tennis clubs and explain that kids will be given a chance at these private clubs. Of course it can’t happen at this club, we’ve the members to think about, but it will happen everywhere else.

OK, OK, so what about the schools? Well what about them? Playing fields have been built upon at an alarming rate, and tennis courts are not an economical use of space. I can think of no sport which uses a larger area to allow 4 people to have a bit of a lark. Take a class of 32 kids, you’d need 8 courts to employ them all in a game of doubles, how many schools have that? Even if you play over a half court, how many schools have 4 courts that are serviceable?

Plus the equipment is expensive. Plus the teachers don’t have the specialist coaching skills, plus the best weather for this sport is when the little buggers are off on holiday. And why tennis? Cricket, rugby, athletics, gymnastics, all these sports are endlessly calling for timetable space. Then there’s the other subjects which demand more focus, cooking, music, drama, art, science. Christ how many kids are leaving school unable to bloody read and count? And you want them to learn tennis? No, the time is better spent on errrm, personal, social, citizenship, political indoctrination, benefit forms filling in, diversity, inclusivity class or whatever it is called this week. With the amount of different groups making demands that their own special interest is timetabled, it is a wonder the little angels aren’t putting in 14 hour, 6 day weeks.

Tennis is an irrelevance, and is treated as such. So let’s stop this bullshit every summer, can we? Let’s just sit back and enjoy watching the miserable Scottish lad who is quite good, and will almost, but probably not quite, win Wimbledon. Then we can forget the sport until next June.