NEXT week the Guernsey Football Association executive sits down to vote on whether to send teams to Rhodes next summer. The inside word is that the vote could be a close-run thing and the island’s best players need to ready themselves for massive disappointment.

In fact, forget the ‘D’ word, how about get ready for a kick in the teeth, boys?

For that’s what a negative decision would be, not only to the island’s best players, but to the whole Guernsey football community and, to a lesser extent, the Guernsey Island Games Association.

Only this week, island boss Steve Ogier came out and urged the GFA executive to make the right decision.

‘Everyone wants to go: all the players and all the coaching staff. The board knows that – I told them,’ said Ogier.

Sure it will be stifling hot and it’s a punishing schedule, but it will be the same for all the competing teams and with careful preparation it’s nothing that the two squads and their support teams cannot overcome.

The Island Games football tournament is now established as the biggest and most important competition available to our best players who now more than ever need inspiration and ambition to lift them out of the cruise mode which is the dull, domestic fare available to them.

Just as Dale Garland and Lee Merrien need the carrot of Olympic and Commonwealth Games to slog themselves into shape, our best footballers need the Island Games and potential glory.

In preparing for the last three NatWest Island Games tournaments, the island football squads have dedicated themselves to getting fitter than ever before to represent the island.

It really means something to them, so much more than a decent South-West Counties League campaign.

To some, winning an Island Games gold medal even rivals beating Jersey in the Muratti.

To deny our footballers the chance to go to Rhodes will leave them deflated and, I fear, less committed to the representative challenges ahead of them this winter.

A ‘no’ to Rhodes would also be a slap in the face to all those diehard Guernsey football fans who will be following the 17th Island Games via the Guernsey Press, radio and television.

Guernsey football – at senior domestic club level in the worst shape ever – needs all the excitement and inspiration it can get.

LEAVING out the professional efforts of Andy Priaulx, I cannot readily think of a more outstanding individual performance this year than the one Sam Herridge produced in the London Triathlon last month.

It ranks, I’d guess, somewhere around or just above the efforts of Lee Merrien and Dale Garland at the senior AAAs and swimmer Ian Powell at the ASA Nationals.

But make no mistake, Herridge’s effort was that of a rapidly improving and very dedicated athlete.

‘She’s got much more to come, too,’ said her coach, Alan Rowe.

Her London performance was such that her finishing time was quicker than that of Scott Pitcher, the elite male triathlete who represented Jersey at the Commonwealth Games earlier this year.