HARDLY a week goes by when you don’t hear of sport and recreation’s value to the wider UK community and population.

It keeps potential trouble-makers off the streets, helps in the fight to keep people fit and healthy. We all know the arguments and they are bang on right. A life in sport is beneficial in so many ways.

Today, at St Peter’s, Sylvans Sports Club will receive a Football Association Community Award for their brilliant efforts in bringing sport with all its cultural benefits, to the area, not to mention unmeasurable amounts of fun to dozens of boys and girls.

Sylvans would like to do more, widen their horizons, and for two full decades have tried desperately to gain a second pitch across the little lane which runs parallel with one of the best-maintained sports ground the island has.

But Sylvans still wait, frustrated by seemingly unhelpful people close to them and by the Environment Department.

This week, Rangers announced their plans to move across the St Andrew’s parish and set up home at Les Vauxbelets, a potentially exciting ground move which, should it happen, will have their neighbours across the rolling fields of the island’s south-west corner, wondering just how they managed to do it.

I just hope Rangers find Environment a good deal more helpful than they have been to the westerners, who have long hoped to be able to utilise the fields next to their St Peter’s ground but remain stymied.

Crazily, they can use those two fields for their players warming up ahead of games and kick around a football.

They can fill one of them with cars on match days, but they cannot knock down a low-lying hedge and play a proper game of football there.

They are hemmed in at St Peter’s and they need help.

That Environment hides behind rules that prevent a good, proven community club from developing in a reasonable manner and with no wish or plan to destroy the green aspect of the land they own, while at the same time all around the island we see developments that are incongruous with their surroundings.

It is time to end this nonsense and I urge the Guernsey Sports Commission and the Culture and Leisure Department to get fully behind these two clubs and, while they are at it, North also and the King George V Field trustees, who wish to get permission for change of use of the former Babbe vinery and develop it for sport.

It is true that Guernsey has, historically, not done badly for sporting facilities, but we could – and at no expense to the public – provide our sportsmen and women with even better facilities with some heavyweight argument and influence to assist the likes of Sylvans, Rangers. North and the KGV.

With these clubs we are not talking about barely-known entrepreneurs looking to make a quick buck, but proven and trustworthy clubs who want the best for their stars of tomorrow.

We are not looking at ugly floodlight pylons, unedifying buildings, we are talking well manicured, flat, green sports fields which no longer have any practical use. Anyway methane is damaging the ozone.

So come on Environment and Culture and Leisure: look into this please and let’s make sure it happens.

No excuses. Just do it.

TIME and again the UK Press bangs on about whether the latest potential owner of a football club is ‘fit and proper’ to be welcome into the game.

It’s a good thing but why should it be restricted to the boardroom, should not the same thing apply to those out on view – i.e. the players.

It was the case of the disgraced Wigan striker Marlon King which prompted this thought.

The man has a criminal record as long as the list of goals he has scored in the Premiership, yet his agent thinks clubs will want him back when he has done his 18 months inside.

For the good of the game, men like King and Joey Barton should be politely told to go away and find another hobby because what parent wants their child to look up to these unfit and improper sportsmen as role models?

I would not.