The Leisure Review: Row Z

Row Z edition 76; dateline 3 May 2013

They’ll be dancing down in Sydney this evening
In the north-west corner of Derbyshire they would call it peevish. In the corners of English rugby clubhouses where bitter, old men sit and drink they will doubtless have more colourful words to describe it. But wherever people who know about rugby gather, few will have a good word to say about Warren Gatland’s decision not to select Chris Robshaw for the forthcoming Lions tour. No doubt regular readers will remember when the tour party drawn from the teams of the four home unions was called the British Lions and both will share Sideliner’s bemusement as to when and why the name was changed – perhaps it was when South African drug cheats were included – but perhaps it is as well that teams such as Willie-John McBride’s are not tarnished by too close an association with the all-too-predictably-taffy-centric selection of New Zealander Gatland. By all means, Wazza, parade the chip on your shoulder, the one you share with the entire county of Wales, and ‘select’ the spear-tackling Warburton as captain but please don’t expect anyone to believe that there are four – FOUR – better back row players than Robshaw in your little principality, whether they be Australian or not. The one good thing is we won’t have to give the Family Murdoch any of our hard-earned money to follow the fortunes of a side that so demonstrably isn’t ours.

Sideliner B.A., M.Ed., Dips. (Omatic) blurts truth
The suspicion that the soi disant professional body for the sector – it’s called CIMSPA in case you had forgotten – only exists to provide its members with letters to put after their names continues to grow. With LinkedIn contributions now being signed by people (well men) boasting they are “FCIMSPA (Chartered)” you get the sense CEO Sean Holt will be casting around for any additional suffices he can sell to credulous pool managers on the grounds that association with the now virtually virtual organisation engenders respect within the industry. Matching that suspicion for vigour is the growing belief that the CIMSPA letterati had best make the most of their moment in the imagined sun.

Osborne 0, CAMRA -5
Many colleagues will have followed the arm wrestle between Chancellor Osborne and the forces of good represented in this telling by the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA). The battleground has been what aficionados call the “beer duty escalator” and the victory has gone to CAMRA and their mate Pyrrhus. When the measure, which meant that the tax on beer rose whether anyone was paying attention or not, was discontinued, the price of beer was immediately reduced, by a penny per pint. Meanwhile, landlords are facing increases in business rates, the minimum wage and the price of utilities while people are spending less in pubs. With something called the “British Beer & Pub Association’s quarterly Beer Barometer” (their caps) suggesting that consumption of beer in pubs was down 5.5% in the first three months of 2013 CAMRA may well have had its mind on the wrong thing.

What’s in an article?
The Leisure Review’s commitment to coaching is well-documented and has even given rise to a whole new website specifically for thinking coaches (it’s at www.thecoachingreview.co.uk) but unless the editor of said site wishes to continue to count Sideliner among the people who don’t criticise it then he had better steer clear of the views of one G Neville Esq, late of Manchester United and now seen mainly on the television where he is apparently paid by Rupert Murdoch to talk a good game. Such is the woeful state of English top-flight football, however, that, having been a talking head for all of five minutes, Neville was then recruited to put the cones out for Gentleman Roy Hodgson, a man who can coach kickball, although managing the prima donnas who are picked for “our” national team seems beyond him. Appointment by media hasn’t really worked since Joe Mercer picked the entire England squad using the tabloid newspapers as his guide rather than scouting reports so to find Neville being referred to as “the England coach” is more than slightly worrying. Manchester’s answer to Paulo de Canio, another football “expert” whose ability is in self-promotion rather than tactics or skills, is only one of a large band of England’s coaches. He is an England coach. Believe he is any more than that and you might begin to believe that the reason we do so badly on the international stage is that English players can’t get a game for English-based clubs because foreign players are blocking their way. This rank syllogism must sit alongside the aforesaid Italian’s denial of his fascistic sympathies on the shelf marked “self-serving nonsense” and Mr Neville should be ignored. He is now.

A bicycle, a cigar, a gauntlet
The debate over the role of cycling in the future of our nation’s development continues apace and, as the editor notes in this issue of The Leisure Review at what even the most charitable reviewer would describe as ‘great length’, has gathered considerable momentum with the publication of the All-Party Parliamentary Cycling Group’s report Get Britain Cycling. Hard on the heels of this document comes another significant contribution to the debate, this time from the august professional body for water diviners and sewer orderlies, the Chartered Institution of Water and Environmental Management (CIWEM). The CIWEM active transport policy statement (you can find it at in full at www.ciwem.org.uk) has already seen the group of privately educated fops that passes these days for a government scrambling to get on board the idea of a national agency for active transport, having not yet noticed that this represents another U-turn, this time in their detestation of all things quango. Not mentioned in the CIWEM policy statement – a regrettable omission in Sideliner’s opinion – is the personal criterion for accessible cycling of the chief executive, Sideliner’s favourite environmentalist and decorated freeman of the City of London, Mr Nick Reeves. His view is that the cycling lobby will not make any significant headway in persuading the ordinary man and woman off the Clapham omnibus and onto a bicycle until someone solves the problem of a wind-proof ashtray, the better to facilitate the great man’s penchant for a cigar while he is pedalling. Designers of the world, the gauntlet is down. Saddle up.

Prime-time devil dining for YST
When the Youth Sport Trust went into business with Cadbury (or ‘the distributors of diabetes’ as we used to like to call them until our lawyers told us to stop), some eyebrows raised. When they allowed Sainsbury’s, the people who peddle unnaturally, invariant vegetables while killing off local shops, to buy themselves a positive association with children’s sport, a number of people were pained. But now that they have hooked up with Sky and promote themselves every Thursday on some high-numbered satellite channel (no, not that high) the time has come to protest. So. “Down with that sort of thing!” Or, of you prefer your sloganeering a little more posher: “A man is known by the company he keeps.”

Sideliner