IT’S relentless stuff, this sports lark.
Don’t tell anyone preparing for an Island Games year that sport is nothing more than a healthy hobby, because if you are doing it properly then a pastime it most certainly isn’t.

This month’s two big sport celebrations – the Carey Olsen Sports Commission awards and Sportingbet Channel Islands Sports Personality of the Year – are heavyweight shows and it’s fitting that we are lucky to have Steve Cram and Lawrence Dallaglio to headline them.

The events, both staged at Beau Sejour, will emphasise once again that as we head towards the close of the first decade of the 21st century, that CI sport is stronger than ever.

Even Jersey aren’t bad.

It’s a golden generation for most Guernsey sport, but if there are areas we need to lift our game a notch or two it is in the three major team sports – football, cricket and rugby.

They each suffer from problems peculiar to each other.

Rugby’s biggest problem is, that for all its recent Siam successes and climb up the national league ladder, the domestic structure remains pitiful.

On this one, it’s encouraging to know that help is at hand.

We are days away from the formation of a new Guernsey Rugby Association and confirmation of the sport’s first full-time RDO, but the new man’s role will be not to strengthen GRUFC’s hand at London Three South-West level, but more to put in place a structure that will one day soon have rugby enjoying the healthy senior competition long enjoyed by the footballers and cricketers.

Not that those two sports have got it all right.

Cricket’s major problems are largely twofold now that it has put in place a superb junior development programme.

One handicap they can’t overcome overnight is to cover for missing out on almost a whole generation of cricketers who have disappeared out of view as the combined result of UK market forces taking them away, a fallow period for good players emanating from Elizabeth College and the sad demise of decent cricket at the Grammar School.

But the biggest challenge facing our cricket is not how to produce quality sides at international level, it is to instigate some passion and real desire for the game among those who play for the top sides.

Too many remain uncommitted to weekend cricket and somehow our emerging young players have got to be ingrained with the same attitude of their counterparts up and down the UK. That largely means, if it is summer, weekend’s are for cricket.

The cricketers can learn something from football in that respect.

The bulk of those playing Division One football see their sport as something to be done regardless of the side’s fortunes, and I bet the players at North and Bels put more into preparation than all the island’s weekend cricket league sides put together.

Football’s biggest problem is that simply doesn’t have the carrot which cricket enjoys courtesy of the ICC’s funding and world competition programme and rugby has via the national league structure.

That lack of real incentive is costing the biggest team sport dear and if the new rugby development officer is as influential and dynamic as the Sports Commission hope he is, then there will be an added challenge to football for the services of young sportsmen.

Division One football and the annual Muratti at the end of it is fine for what it is, but it won’t get footballers challenging for the top prizes at the Sports Commission and CI Sports Personality, and that’s a real shame.

Mind you, I don’t see any Guernsey rugby stars or cricketers up there either.

‘They each suffer from problems peculiar to each other’