The Leisure Review: high ground

Edition 4; dateline 5 April 2011

The Friendly Games?
MacSideliner was interested to take in the press and broadcast media coverage of a peculiar legacy angle to the Glasgow 2014 Commonwealth Games and the aspect of legacy which must now surround all major sporting events. The sports development world usually debates itself into a stupor about whether a particular event has had a legacy, whether any events have ever had legacies and what even is a legacy. Then the sportocrats manage to top it all off with incredible and technically impossible new descriptions for things like ‘advance legacies’ or ‘pre-legacies’. You couldn’t make this stuff up (well most of us couldn’t, not with a straight face anyway). But all of this is not even the point. Surely the most important point of (and indeed the proper definition of a legacy, especially one for a major event) is that it leaves something behind after the event has passed. The dictionary description is “something that is left in a will”, which means that Granny actually has to have something to pass on before you get anything from her. Now I know there is a possible exception here when Granny is forced to offload the assets she has worked all her days to build up in order to avoid the government nicking it off her to pay private care home business entrepreneurs to “look after” her in her final days, but I’m sticking to the principle that legacies come after something not before. Are you in a stupor yet? Glasgow 2014 remember? One family from the east end of Glasgow were delivered their own personal legacy last week; they were made homeless. Mr and Mrs Jaconelli, a very typical Glaswegian Scots-Italian family if the census people are listening (although their household won’t exist by next week as it is now being demolished, which might skew your numbers), were the last residents in a classic Glasgow sandstone tenement block and had lived there pretty much all of their lives. Their property was compulsorily purchased by the city council and everyone else had moved out of the block but, curiously, the Jaconellis didn’t want to move to make way for the athletes’ village. If newspaper reports are true the family’s expectations on a price to move appear on the high side but the opposite can be said of the various financial offers from the city council, the first being, apparently, £30,000. I’m no estate agent but I think I can safely say that the post-event athlete village properties, if sold on the open market, might fetch a bit more than that. The whole thing is a personal tragedy as well as a PR disaster for Games organisers and supporters but when the dust settles, literally, the major events machine will simply roll on. There is a growing trend to talk about how sport can regenerate communities but I don’t think we had this type of outcome in mind. One final thought – where have all the other residents of the block and the street gone? Are they still local or have they been spread far and wide like their predecessors from the Highland Clearances?

Scott’s Porage Oats – “They make you play younger” claim!
Congratulations to England for winning the Six Nations. It was an interesting end to the tournament. To paraphrase one newspaper columnist, France beat Scotland, who beat Italy who beat France who beat Ireland who beat England who beat everybody else, and then Wales nearly won the championship in the final match. But what of MacSideliner’s man of the tournament? Step up Fibreman Chris Paterson. Now being dubbed “the Peter Pan of Scottish rugby”, Paterson, soon to be 33, slotted in at full back for his 103rd and 104th caps against England and Italy respectively. Not only did he dish up a rugby education to the other big name Chris (he’ll just have to ‘swallow’ that) Ashton in the Calcutta Cup match but he made two try-saving wonder tackles, firstly on his namesake and then on Ben Foden. Stirring stuff indeed. They say that porridge provides lasting energy and this appears to be a proven scientific fact now, as Paterson pulled off yet another try-saver in the final minutes against Italy when Luke MacLean (don’t get me started on international rugby eligibility again) looked an absolute certainty to score after a fantastic run down the wing. The crowd and his fellow players were cheering Chris until the final whistle. The other good news for us Scots is that we avoided the wooden spoon by beating Italy, who beat France who... you know the rest.

Scott’s Porage Oats – “They make you play younger” fact!
I had prepared a Thierry Lacroix-style line just in case any of my southern or Celtic colleagues felt the desire to have a wee pop at MacSideliner. Thierry, when France once got the wooden spoon, was asked in the studio what he felt about that. With a Gallic shrug he said (and I write in a French accent): “Eet is very good for ze cooking.” Just before the obvious jibe comes to mind, one linking wooden spoons and porridge, you need to know that you don’t stir porridge with a spoon. As everyone knows, you stir it with a spurtle and the best porridge maker each year wins the Golden Spurtle. I’m not making this up. By the way, Mr sub-editor, the ‘porridge’ in Scott’s Porage Oats is spelt that way as a trademark; think Nike swoosh, only a bit stickier. And I’m not making that up either.

Flying coops and full-backs
Is there a role model effect? Cancel the research consultants and avoid paying £15,000 you haven’t got. MacSidey can confirm that two mini rugby Sundays later in Bonny Scotland and the swallow dives have all but flown the coop and been replaced instead with numerous, last gasp, try-saving tackles.

New Scotland? Old (Firm) politics – the grin
Rangers and Celtic, or the other way around depending on your cycloptic view (Old Firm fans are famous for their unilocular vision), are still mad keen to get on TV in England. Here’s an example of how the singular vision thing works. There was a comedian way back when MacSideliner was a kid, called Lex Maclean (he never played rugby for Italy as far as I know). He had an early version of a TV sketch show, a bit like Harry and Paul. One of his sketches involved guys going through a turnstile for a big match. The first guy asks to get in for half price as he only has one eye, and in he goes. The next guy up is Lex. He asks to get in for half price too. The turnstile operator says: “Wait a minute, you’ve got two perfectly good eyes” and Lex replies: “Aye, but I’m only here to see the Rangers!” Ba-boom.

New Scotland? Old (Firm) politics – the grimace
There is, of course, more than one way of getting on the telly and this time the perfect storm included the two Glasgow giants playing each other 7 (seven) – does anyone still remember the Grandstand teleprinter when it used to do that? – times counting the league and both cup competitions. It’s like a football version of Groundhog Day except it is a Strathclyde Police senior officer who sticks his head up out of the ground and decides whether to come out or go back in again. Unfortunately, instead of sniffing the air, ‘the polis’ study the rate of domestic violence and other crimes of aggression around the time of these ‘sporting encounters’ and it doesn’t make for nice reading. One of the recent matches made UK network TV when, among other things, two of the management staff, one from each club, got themselves into a snarling match while they were supposed to be shaking hands at the end of the match. Arrests were up among the fans into the bargain and it all culminated in the chief of Strathclyde Police making a request to Scotland’s first minister (and Hearts fan; they are third in the league) to host a summit aimed at making sure the remaining fixtures, including cup finals, went off without the sideshows. The radio call-in shows, of course, saw all this as manna from heaven and went straight into two-hour specials on the subject, most of which quickly deteriorated into a “he said, but he said” routine followed by a “these politicians shouldn’t be sticking their noses into football” mantra. Get your heads in the game, guys. It’s all about the product you know...

The Boys from Brazil
It’s more sport and politics, and sporting politics, as the Samba beat with a wee bit of Red Hot Chilli Pipers rolls into London town. Stop the bus, what was that? Scotland are playing Brazil? At the Emirates? Did England get the World Cup early or something or are they event-sharing with a Middle East state now? And what’s the legacy? So Scotland has a new national stadium and you only have to walk 500 (FIVE HUNDRED) miles to get to it? That’s if you live in Glasgow anyway. Nice! Any chance Celtic and Rangers could play out of it in the Premiership? No, that’s just a dream; or is it? Cue radio phone-in special. Nonetheless, we are playing five-times world champions Brazil and maybe we’ll wake up in Kansas, Toto, and have won the game. Maybe it was all a dream? Yes it was: Scotland 0 Brazil 2. It was looking so good after beating Northern Ireland 3-0 too. Last word? Davie Dodds, Scottish footballer known, due to his good looks, as the Elephant Man, once got concussion during a game. The physio said to the manager, “Boss, Davie has had a bad knock to the head and he doesn’t know who he is – what will we do?” “Put him up front and tell him he’s Pele,” replied the manager.

MacSideliner