The Leisure Review: high ground

High Ground edition 2; dateline 31 January 2011

Hello again from a slightly less snowy Scotland and Happy New Year to all from McSideliner. Here’s to a successful sporting 2011. So what’s been happening (far) north of Watford?

Sex, lies and inappropriate email traffic
It would seem that the normal stereotype of Scotland and what a Scottish political scandal should look like has been shattered. Or has it? In the past, one of our previous first ministers had to resign over an expenses issue (not that Scots politicos have exclusive rights on that one). Now one of our former members of the Scottish parliament (MSP) has been convicted for perjury after winning an earlier damages case against a tabloid newspaper that published stories on his personal life and allegations of attendance at swingers’ clubs. The politician concerned was often portrayed as a non-smoking teetotaller whose favourite recreational activity was five-a-sides, of the footballing kind that is. The perjury case was about lying in court (obviously) and then receiving money for damages rather than any ‘off the ball’ incidents, as it were, so perhaps the national stereotype remains intact after all. Whatever happened to the former first minister by the way? Well he has just completed a review of Scottish football for the current government who were previously his political opponents; talk about jersey swapping. Oh yes, and there are allegations of even more jersey swapping when the former MSP’s case generated a spin-off story concerning a “Scottish football personality” being connected with the swingers’ angle. Would that be an in-swinger then?

Back to the men in black
Following the footie flavour and harking back to last months ‘men in black’ theme, the Scottish football referees story takes yet another twist. Several of the Scottish Football Association (SFA) administrative staff dismissed for distributing the inappropriate emails regarding the papal visit have now been reinstated on appeal. However, the influential (as influential as a former FIFA World Cup referee can be) head of referee development has had his appeal rejected. Since that happened the wider ‘are refs biased against one half of the Old Firm?’ storyline has taken a really sinister twist with Celtic’s manager and some Irish players being sent bullets in the post from Northern Ireland around the time of the fixture against local rivals Rangers. It’s all getting a too much like the Tom Cruise movie The Firm rather than the Old Firm which is pretty sad.

Ashes to Ashes
Well done to England for beating Australia in Australia for the first time in about a quarter of a century. It seems to me that the Ashes are turning into a bit of an Americanised World Series sort of thing; you know, with there being only the two teams that can win it? Personally, I can’t wait until Scotland beat Ireland at the next hybrid shinty/hurling match so that the BBC can make that the first-up item on all its news programmes. Who knows what may happen next: a knighthood for Ronald(o) Ross, goal scorer extraordinaire of Scottish Shinty fame? Well, the prime minister is called David William Donald Cameron after all. The Ashes fuss got me thinking about what Scottish sporting highlights happened around 25 years ago. In those days our football team were still qualifying for major tournaments, one of our star players, Kenny Dalglish (name familiar?), was making a successful transition from player to manager; Alan Hansen was moving into talking a good game, although believe it or not he wasn’t our first- or second-choice central defender; and Graeme Souness was being a touch aggressive. We also had a striker who played for Barcelona, Steve Archibald, scoring 24 goals in 55 appearances and helping Barca win La Liga for the first time in many years. Hard to believe, I know. Even harder to get your head round, perhaps, is the fact that Dundee United reached the 1987 UEFA cup final and I think they beat Barcelona on the way! In other sports we were doing OK too. In athletics, McColgan, Murray and McKean were champions and regularly medalling, Robert Millar from the Gorbals in Glasgow was the Tour de France king of the mountains, Loretta Cusack was women’s world judo champion and, more stereotypically, Jocky Wilson was the world darts champion. When will we see their likes again? Pretty soon I hope; and believe. Fire up the Quattro.

I blame the government.. or should that be the arms-length, non-departmental public body?
Scotland’s national sporting agency, SportScotland, continues to wrestle with the many challenges laid down by having a pretty ballsy nationalist government complete with an even ballsier sports fan in Alex Salmond as first minister. These challenges include leading the installation of a network of community sports hubs across the country as part of the 2014 Commonwealth Games legacy. The agency’s target is not spectacularly ambitious in that it wants to create one per local authority area, making a grand total of 32. This would mean that the Highland Council area, which is the size of Wales but with more mountains and a huge chunk of Europe’s total coastline, might only have the one hub.

Scandifilia and indoor pitches
Our nationalist politicians are pretty big Scandiphiles [lovers of all things Scandinavian. Ed]. They tend to love anything even remotely Swedish Chef and tend come over all hoordy-goordy when it comes to sport or any other kind of public service provision for that matter. A case in point is the provision of indoor full-size synthetic football pitches. In Scotland it has taken the best part of ten years and, to be fair, some decent shifts put in by national agency staff and the ubiquitous local authorities, to get us a handful of these pitches; well three to be more exact. Finland, in stark contrast, has over 1000 with one in every medium-sized town and Iceland, with a population of 300,000 and whose U21 side just put paid to Scotland’s European Championship qualifying hopes, has seven. Norway is similarly well provided with indoor pitches which leads me to a quick aside. A few years ago I read with some bemusement that the Norwegian equivalent of the chancellor of the exchequer had gone off on sick leave as he was suffering “stress and anxiety” due to the fact that he couldn’t decide how to spend the annual £4 billion pound surplus generated after all the country’s bills had been paid. Norway pays for its public provision partly through its nationalised oil and gas fund, which is a really big national savings account, so it’s not that difficult to understand why the Scots Nats are pretty keen on similar arrangements on this side of the North Sea.

Another diversion: dangerous decisions
It is also worth recalling, while we are diverting, that the SNP (Scottish National Party) and SportScotland have a bit of history. Every national agency has its ‘auld enemies’, or it makes them fairly sharply, but not that many end up with a political party naming them explicitly in its manifesto as something to be abolished. That’s where SportScotland ended up in 2007 and only a combination of Scotland bidding for and subsequently winning the 2014 Commonwealth Games, the SNP not finding the time to come up with a really credible alternative and a frantic rearguard action by the agency itself saved the manifesto commitment from becoming a reality. The current Scottish government ended up reprieving SportScotland after an extensive ‘consultation exercise’ but did follow through on the previous administration’s commitment to relocating its headquarters from Edinburgh to downtown Glasgow, losing over 80 percent of its staff along the way. Ever since the axe hovered over its head, SportScotland has been trying to demonstrate its decentralised reach by developing a regional infrastructure under various similarly catchy titles. This, by default, draws them into tensions with the 32 local authorities, who of course become concerned that anything more regional might mean less support for local development. The real challenge for SportScotland is to demonstrate the extent of its devolution. How regional is the decision-making and policy-setting? Does it reflect regional needs or are decisions still taken over at HQ?

Hub-a Hub-a
All of which takes us back to the nub of the hubs. Now that we know some of the things that the current Scottish government are big on, what else are they loving? Well, they very much like very localised, community-led and in many cases community-run provision; a sort of Big MacSociety if you like. Can we look forward to a corporate sponsorship deal in near future as in, “Would you like deep fried Mars bar with that?” I’ll leave you to chew on that one for now. Community Sports Hubs are a microcosm of the government/non-departmental public body ‘special relationship’, representing a national Commonwealth Games legacy development, a Spartan target of one local hub per local authority area so potentially only one local community is impacted in an entire area, leaving the councils and sometimes their externalised arms-length delivery organisations with the challenge of picking the one winner and losers. Then there is the question of where does the regional support kick in and how, or whether it does or doesn’t. Confused? Recently and probably in an admirable attempt to help clear up any confusion, the national agency did what national agencies tend to do and ended up kind of moving the goalposts; just a bit. At the start of the community sports hubs drive the mantra was “it’s not (necessarily) a building” and “it’s not quite a traditional leisure centre without noticeable increases in community influence over management aspects”; it could perhaps be a campus approach or even a localised geography of facilities. This has now changed to “community sports hubs are single sites’. This leaves partners and councils in particular with potential dilemmas such as having, for example, a rugby club that literally borders a cricket club looking to work together but only one can be the hub. This creates more questions than answers: which one gets given the status of being the hub (and therefore gets the funding) and who becomes the bit player? And of course the other big one: where do you put up the national agency attribution signage? The real risk in all this is that despite everybody’s best efforts the real losers might end up (as so often happens) being local community sports organisations. Time and timing is also a risk as if this one needs to get cleared up quickly. It is basically a good idea but the political parties are gearing up for Scottish parliamentary elections in May 2011. Although the SNP is behind in the polls, it still likely to be a tight contest once again so it is vital that community sports hubs do not become a political casualty in the process. The Hub-bub will no doubt continue.

Ole! (Bruce)
In a land down under, identity crises abound as the less well
known Spaniard la Ande (another product of the prolific Iberian tennis
development system) makes it to another grand slam final, only to take
second prize once again. Some of the competing claims on his
nationality disappear faster than a Sky Sports presenter seeing their
name on a sports equity seminar delegates list. So what’s going to happen with our (or oor) Andy? Will his destiny be that of David Coulthard and Colin Montgomeriem as in nobody likes to compete against him except when there is the chance he might end up
as runner up? Or will he get his head completely in the game for the
whole game, set, and championship one of these times? McSideliner truly, madly, (obviously) and deeply hopes so, and therefore the blue facepaint is being kept at room temperature; for those from SW19 that's like being in the fridge.

McSideliner