SO it is that the GFA are digging their heels in and are to fight the clubs over dismantling their four-year plan.

Good on them.

More power to their collective elbows, I say.

The GFA are right to stay firm and reject ‘old style’ under-18 football because our youth leagues are a mess and unbalanced, our representative youth sides are poor and have been for a long while.

The whole structure of the youth game in the island needs a radical overhaul, but until such time individual clubs put aside self-interest, dismiss the idea that winning is everything and what is simply good for their own club, this vital area won’t move forward.

We won the Muratti Vase, but in youth development we are way behind the Reds across the water.

The under-14s and under-16s leagues do not test the best and the disparity in skill levels across the clubs is disturbing.

It would be no different with a full under-18 competition unless that event precluded players who play at first team or under-21 level.

That does not mean we do not have some excellent individual talent. We do.

But it is how we challenge them that is vital and that certainly is not happening now.

Clubs still see winning as all-important.

Getting the result is everything when they sniff a trophy is to be won.

Blow how it is achieved and the cost to the individual player who under the guidelines the GFA clubs are collectively proposing at next week’s AGM, will only serve to lower standards and wear the best players out.

The clubs may say that they always have the player’s best interest at heart, but there is an awful lot of evidence to suggest that is just piffle in a current arrangement where we are very good at culling the ordinary and forcing boys out of the game.

With the under-21 league proving to be a cut above the old style Jackson or ‘Junior A’, we do not need a wealth of under-18 league football.

The vast majority of our best under-18s are getting tough, meaningful and testing action in the pan-island CI Schools League which is twice the under-18 league in terms of a significant competition, and on top of Division One or Under-21 games and representative action, that should be more than enough.

Less is more in this instance.

ONE night of ELT20 (pictured) does not make a summer, but there were encouraging signs from Monday’s two elite evening cricket games to suggest that the Guernsey Cricket Board and its players might be onto a winner with this new competition.

It was fantastic to see such a youthful Argylls team win against a very decent Wanderers side, while at the KGV we saw plenty of evidence that Cobo Tigers will probably win this nine-game, high-season bash-and-smash on the grass, as comfortably as they won Division One of the traditional evening league which runs by its side and with a playing criteria few outside the GCB hierarchy can understand let alone reason for.

What we are seeing evolve in evening cricket may offer us an early peek at what Division One football here might look like once Guernsey FC are in action every week, only a more muddled version which in 2011 needs to be made fairer and easier for everyone, from the player to the armchair follower, to understand.

What we do know and should accept is that the very top players won’t feature on a regular basis at domestic level.

The GCB and GFA rightly argue that all that counts is the best get better and will lead to a raising of standards.‘…how we challenge them is vital and that certainly is not happening now’