This Is Guernsey

IT IS the best sport happening in the UK this week and you will not find a word on it, or a picture, on any tabloid back page.

Indeed, even the qualities will probably give it a miss on their showpiece page, preferring to tuck it away inside behind half-a-dozen pages crammed with reaction and viewpoints on a friendly international football match in which England – I’m told because I switched off after five minutes – did not have a shot on target in 90 minutes of utter sporting dross.

The sport is cycling, the event the world track championships at the National Cycling Centre in Manchester.

It is not only genuinely exciting, but Britain are brilliant at it, Bradley Wiggins particularly so and he thrashed the Dutchman Jenning Huizenga to retain his world four-kilometre individual pursuit title on the opening night.

The following morning, not a single national paper had the great man or his achievement on the back page, with the exception being The Times who blurbed it among their top-of-the-page tasters.

Instead . . . football, football, football.

Sports coverage, like so much of life, is not fair, but in the case of modern-day professional football it has simply gone beyond the pale. I’m turned off. So is the guy who sits across the desk from me in the sports department.

Mitchell and Webb, two of the funniest guys on national TV, recently devoted several minutes on a sketch, which ridiculed a certain almighty satellite network for its obsession with the once-beautiful game.

My son was creased with laughter as the parody of football promotion was taken to the most ridiculous lengths imaginable.

It was funny, but the joke may have been lost on those who simply refuse to take off the blinkers and focus their eyes on a sporting world that does not have the Premier League at its axis and is not tainted by vast amounts of money.

For you younger readers [under-40s] it was not always thus.

Thirty years ago, the tabloids and qualities were of similar mind in reporting the world-record exploits of those athletic greats, Coe and Ovett.

They were the best in Britain and received due acclamation, due column inches.

Three decades on, unless you are Lewis Hamilton, pushed on by a media PR machine second only to soccer in terms of clout and revenue, you are, on a day-to-day basis, second class.

And as our own Andy Priaulx has discovered, the Wigginses of this world don’t get their just deserts.

It is high time we were weaned off this 24-hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week, obsession with football and concentrated on our real sporting heroes, the men and women who really are world class and not those erroneously elevated to that status, but who get paid £100,000 plus a week.

I like to think that we at the Guernsey Press prioritise excellence as opposed to falling into the trap that anything that involves a piece of fashioned spherical leather must be put on top.

Our job is made so much easier by the sheer number of sports stars we can boast and the national or internationals events that they attend.

This week the focus has been on Sophie Platts at the laser radial youth world sailing championships in Auckland.

The fact that she has struggled to make it into the top 20 from a fleet of 38 should not be seen as failure, but an acknowledgement that a girl from a small island is mixing it with the best from Australia, New Zealand, France, Denmark, the Netherlands, Ireland, Croatia, Greece, Italy, Canada and Japan.

Last week it was our bowlers at the national indoor championships, next week Priaulx in Mexico.

Indeed, hardly a week now goes by without one of our growing elite competing at national or world level somewhere, and it is with that thought I answer those in the local football fraternity who say there is not enough football in our pages.

And on a national level, oh for a return to the great days of triumphant, patriotic, non-blinkered, non-football-obsessed sporting journalism in both the written media and on television.

Article posted on 29th March, 2008 - 9.29am