WHEN your luck is out, it’s out.

Ask Sylvans Sports Club.

The westerners have worked hard to build themselves into a true community football club and produce a youth development system worthy of the name and yet some members of their parish simply do not appreciate it.

They are being spoilsports to the core.

I was saddened, correction, mildly angered, to hear that Sylvans have moved one step forward and been forced two steps back in their bid to improve their football facilities at St Peter’s.

Earlier this year they won a long-running case to be able to take down a small earth bank in a field next to their main pitch.

They won in extra-time (on appeal) but, Inside Track can sadly report, lost out at the same time as they are still not able to use this extra pitch as the hedge they want to remove just might have something of archaeological importance and apparently needs careful examination before it can be pulled down.

So when the club’s minis section reports back for training this season the club will still find themselves hemmed in as ever.

But not only that.

Sylvans are also paying the price for being caught by a neighbour for using this side pitch for pre-season fitness work before the first day of August.

And do you know what?

Naughty boys that they are, they must  stick to the original pitch outside of Saturday mornings.

From what I understand, the club are also not allowed to use this extra area after 12.30pm on a Saturday, in season, when the minis have gone home.

Just what is going on here?

How can Guernsey claim to be a modern, fair society with recreation and the health of its young inhabitants at the heart of it, when the nincompoops are in charge and snooping on good-as-gold sporting organisations such as Sylvans?

Those few people making existence awkward for the club should be ashamed of themselves and should have been told to go run and jump by the Environment Department, if it had a heart.

But it seems not to have one, because if it did they would not allow this fuddy-duddied, crazy, seemingly vindictive interference to happen.

As for Culture and Leisure and the Sports Commission, I sincerely hope that its most powerful men are knocking on the door of Environment and not only asking some awkward questions, but demanding the end to this silliness which prevents a bit of football, and sometimes not even that, simply running about to raise fitness levels, in a field which is a few hundred metres away from the planned runway extension.

So come on Mr O’Hara, get heavy with your Environmental counterparts and battle for what is right.

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BEING excellent at sport is one thing, to be consistently so is quite another.

And if there is one person on the local sports scene who always seems to produce, no matter what occasion, it is cricketer Jeremy Frith.

Last weekend at Grainville he produced yet another man-of-the-match inter-insular performance, scoring a match-clinching fifty to add to a superb 10-over spell of one for 26.

This after a couple of centuries in the latest European Division Two tournament and five in ICC competitions over the past two years.

He has held together the Emerging Players and, when playing for Cobo, he does the business.

It is clear to see why he almost cut it as a professional first-class cricketer, but most impressive of all is that in the decade or so he has performed on the local stage he has not let his standards drop one iota.

As much as it is Lee Merrien’s job to churn out quality run after quality run and Bobby Eggo to win the vast majority of scratch strokeplay prizes, ‘Mr Cricket’ sees it as his duty to score big runs and set the highest standards.

Is he the best Guernsey cricketer ever?

Quite possibly so.