Row Z edition 72; dateline 7 January 2013
Arise Sir Wiggo, my arse
To cavil at Bradley Wiggins being clapped on the back by sporting cognoscenti and ignorant band-wagon jumpers alike would be both churlish and redundant but that won’t stop us having a go. What on earth has he done to deserve a knighthood? Slain a dragon? Held back hordes of slavering Vikings single-handedly? Stolen half of Bedfordshire and killed anyone who tried to take it off him? Slept with the king’s ugly niece? Nope. He’s travelled none of the above traditional routes to ennoblement. Nor has he done anything particularly useful, like invent the computer, or unheralded, such as help schoolchildren cross a busy road every morning and afternoon whatever the weather. He won a few bike races and Chapeaux! for that, Bradders, but isn’t that what you are supposed to do? By your own admission, these days you largely just do what Shane Sutton tells you when it comes to training and when competing you either go eyeballs-out or do what the road captain of your team tells you. And that’s not hard; well, it’s no harder for you than it is for everyone else in the same race. You were just gifted with slightly more capability than they were and a better back-up team. So your first instinct was the right one: you should have turned it down and been true to yourself. Danny “O Danny” Boyle got it spot on when he refused to buy into the nonsense which is the honours system, preferring to let his Olympic performance speak for itself. And lest we forget, that performance was a damning indictment of the current government and a piece of such sustained irony that, even as it put its tongue in its cheek, it was laughing up its sleeve at the pomposity of the gesture.
Stand up, Sir Brailsford
There is slightly more reason to recognise David “Sir Dave” Brailsford as he really does hide his light under a bushel, at least when he’s not speaking at corporate lunches for suitcases of cash, and he has achieved something quite remarkable over a sustained period of time. And, of course, it’s always nice to see a coach being rewarded with just some of the stardust dropped by the sack-load on the “arms and legs” which swim, run and ride their way to the medals. [Best delete ‘swim’ and insert ‘row’. Ed]
Sir Louis a shoo-in for Pope
Many thanks to all the readers who wrote in (some actually in black ink) to point out to Sideliner that the man this column predicted would become Strictly Come Dancing champion spells his name like the trumpeter not the detective. Very sorry, Louis, and congratulations on your win. We hope we can look forward to seeing this fantastic achievement rewarded with an invitation to take tea in Downing Street and a well-deserved knighthood in the February half-term honours list. If not, perhaps he could have Sir Jimmy Savile’s spare papal knighthood? Or they could just make him pontiff and be done with it, so good was that Charleston.
Bye then, Mr Kelner, its been real
There has been some suggestion in other quarters (the back bar of The Star for one) that a Venn diagram comparing “Row Z regular readers” and “readers of the Manchester Guardian” would show congruent circles. We can not be responsible for both of the others’ reading habits but within the charmed circle of the Row Z contributati (and there’s a word that will catch on) we do indeed stick to a newspaper which reflects our own core values of independence, intelligence and integrity. Which is why we know that Martin Kelner has penned his final Screen break column, which, in case you missed it completely over the last 17 years, deals entirely with televised sport and delights, or delighted, in covering obscure non-sports like darts, log-rolling and rugby league. Mr Kelner is not as funny as he thinks he is but the news nevertheless has hit the community of Row Z Towers hard, representing as it does the closure of the only career path open to our latest intern, a young man who makes couch potatoes look lively and who managed to find something to engage him in red button Olympic wrestling back in the summer.
You say CRB, we say potato
Volunteers in grassroots sport will be buoyed to hear that from 1 December 2012 they will no longer have to subject themselves to the bureaucratic redundancy of a CRB check, although slightly less pleased to learn that this is only because its been renamed the DBS check. It seems that the Criminal Records Bureau has merged with the Independent Safeguarding Authority (ISA) to become the Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) and under the Protection of Freedoms Act 2012 the new agency will “provide a joined up service to combine the criminal records and barring functions”. The key question is of course “What will change?” and we are indebted to our friends at Leicester-shire and Rutland Sport (their hyphen) who report two significant changes. One, there will be a rebranding exercise and the new DBS logo will be introduced to many existing documents; and two, there are some changes to the application form, certificate and some of the language. It is unclear whether the huge number of volunteer hours used up by the checking process will go down, or indeed whether any paedophiles will, but we suspect that neither statistic will be altered significantly by this Titanic deckchair of a development.
A phrase too far
The year (again, that’s last year) ended on a high note for collectors of foot-shooting foolishness linked to social media with the news, published by the UK Sports Network (no, we don’t know either but the Floppy-haired Intern followed them on Twitter when he was working here and nobody else knows how to change it), that Sale Sharks’ head of social media has been sacked following a rant on Facebook. It seems that Holleh Nowrouz, for it was she, got a little fed up with Sharks fans criticising the team (which, it must be said had lost seven home games on the bounce) and wrote – on her personal Facebook page – this: “To the Sale Sharks fans, who comment about the club needing to spend less time blogging and tweeting and more time coaching, the staff who create content for the website and social media platforms, are not the same members of staff who coach the team”. At this point most people would wonder why she felt the need to “explain” this but be broadly on her side. We certainly were and wondered quite why the Division Two-heading, Danny Cipriani-employing, John Mitchell not-employing, Salford-based collective had even bothered with dusting off the disciplinary procedure when we read her closing remark. It seems she finished with the admonition “You absolute ****wits”.
Say that it’s so, Joe
And talking about coaching, which we were a bit earlier, the photocopier repair man who spends far more time in our offices than can be justified has caught wind of a development in the world of sports coaching that saw a number of “influential practitioners” holding “an exploratory meeting” to further web-based discussions about forming “some form of association” to give the poor bloody infantry of the sporting echelon a voice. The chances are, of course, that those involved are consultants or from the commercial sector as nobody who works for an NGB or a CSP would break cover for fear that Sport England or its coaching arm, Sports Coach UK (driven by its own commercial arm Coachwise), would take umbrage. We saw up close what poking SCUK with a stick looks like at a Coaching Insight on professionalism when one of their senior management team (it was John Driscoll) got positively shirty when challenged about his organisation’s track record so we quite understand that taking a tilt at the Armley Hegemony might seem contra-indicated to some. At The Leisure Review, of course, we positively seek to support anyone who, like our own colleague Joe Coach, has something apposite to say on issues such as the failure of the UKCC, the failure of NGB coach education programmes to create fit-for-purpose practitioners, or the rush to the lowest common denominator by coach deployers; but then we’re just “unhelpful” like that. Coaches and their managers and deployers who would like to know what we know should email sideliner@theleisurereview.co.uk as soon as its safe to do so.
Move me, Avril.
The Women’s Sport and Fitness Foundation has launched a major social media campaign to “help women move more” and recruited a southern, white, middle-class, mother of two called Avril as the face, and presumably body, of their efforts. She seems like a nice woman and every right-thinking person would salute the WSSF and their chief executive Sue Tibbals as they seek to surf the legacy wave but the choice of role model does rather smack of “jolly hockey sticks” and may well alienate a large number of the people most in need of using physical activity as more than a way to connect with their well-mannered offspring.
Sideliner
