The Leisure Review: Row Z

Edition number 3; dateline 22 July 2007

Real sport, real time
With my beloved disappearing into the latest Harry Potter and the rain topping up the lake that is our patch of garden, this weekend I have found myself with the time and latitude to monitor both the Open golf and the Tour de France on television while keeping abreast of the cricket on the wireless. The only blot on the landscape is the need to file this column by the time the editor gets into the office on Monday morning and since I fully intend to sample something rough and red from the Languedoc – just to enhance my sense of place you understand – while watching Rasmussen versus Vinokourov and then follow up with a bottle of heather beer left over from Christmas as I watch the final holes from Carnoustie, I am going to have to veer away from the action and witter on about attendant subjects – which just about covers the cricket. So what similarities are there between Le Tour and the Open? Both are populated by men clad in outrageously taste-defying clothing; both take place against singular geographical backdrops; both employ a bewildering array of jargon and focus on the finest technical detail as if it mattered; both are done better by foreigners than Brits and both are tainted by drugs. But the key similarity is that both make fantastic television with amazing technical wizardry, helpful (usually) on-screen data, absolutely expert comment (coupled with occasional bursts of pure balls) and the tension that only live sport can bring oozing out of the TV. Can Rasmussen get away? Is Sergio going to cave? Who will help Astana? Is Peter Alliss going to tell us the joke that got the rules official sacked? Real sport in real time – just a little bit speeded up by the chemicals.

New broom, old galas
Tales reach us from the riverbank that, after a week’s worth of their new chief executive, insiders at the institute formally known as ILAM are remembering the departing one with fondness. New broom Sue Sutton is held to be feisty and combative, and she seems keen to be seen sweeping away any dead wood left by previous incumbents, although her tree surgery skills are unproven at this stage. We would love to report the response from Loughborough-based swimming gurus, ISRM, to the latest ISPAL foot-shooting but their website news page covers only galas.

Formerly known as clean
For as long as Row Z can remember the Sport England website has been ‘clean’, free, not of only of drugs but also of advertisements. Not so now, however. With former waste manager Jennie Price in charge, the agency which “advises, invests in and promotes community sport” in England has clearly decided to take the plunge and take a slice of certain organisations’ marketing spend. Here at the back of the stand, we believe that you can judge an agency by the company it keeps and Sport England’s advertisers – most probably called ‘partners’ in Victoria House jargon – can be found at the moment only on the ‘careers’ page. Not one, but five jobs websites, all purporting to find YOU the JOB YOU CRAVE. Or something like that. But the key indicator of the way Sport England is going – and don’t say we didn’t warn you – is the advert at the top of the page for the CIM Professional Diploma in Marketing. It’s official: we are to become a profession of spin merchants and sizzle sellers, at least in England.

The bottom line: choose your perspective
And finally, lest our wood-chopping and grass-mowing colleagues are feeling left out, news from the world of the horticulturists that wages in the agricultural sector are about to rise to the giddy heights of £6 per hour. Row Z was dismayed – but not surprised – to find that ‘employers’ were dismayed by this decision, taken apparently by the Agricultural Wages Board. Apparently the stovepipe-hat-wearing employers’ problem is that this 4.5% hike “was sure to lead to job losses”. Not to a slight, say 4.5%, cut in profits then? We will leave you with a paragraph from that esteemed publication Horticulture Week: “HTA director general David Gwyther said he was ‘shocked and dismayed’ that the AWB has accepted the proposals, ‘apparently ignoring completely the chorus of alarm expressed by employers at the likely effect’.”