JERSEY rugby player Nick Trower received 33% of the vote to win the 2010 Sportingbet CI Sports Personality of the Year.

With 1,340 of the 3,962 total votes cast by a variety of means, he won comfortably from Heather Watson, the 2009 winner, who was second with 25% and 1,012 votes.

It is unknown how the three others fared.

As the longest standing and most prestigious of British sports awards in the business – the BBC Sports Personality of the Year – has occasionally proved, when it is left to the public all sorts of strange things can happen, none more so than when Her Majesty’s daughter scooped the award in 2006.

It is a safe to assume that Trower won ‘SPOTY’ because Jersey rugby got behind him.

The most successful club in the Channel Islands have around 500 junior members for a start. Throw in their dozens of seniors, organise them to find two votes for your man, and Bob’s your Uncle, you get 1,300 votes and enough to win.

Bringing in domestic team players such as Trower and Allen was always likely to produce such a result.

Meanwhile, the judging panel got every award they were responsible for bang on and it was touching to see Dave Dorey’s outstanding service to sport recognised with the sporting hero award. Simply, he was one.

I sensed a feeling of disappointment among the Guernsey football contingent that they had lost out to Jersey rugby, but if you analyse it the Caesarean club are setting standards, on and off the pitch, that other CI teams can only dream of and work towards.

Guernsey football may get there one day but there is work to do yet and the next step is with GFC.

Meanwhile, Joe Calzaghe proved to be a perfect guest and interesting to listen to, and all in all the night to celebrate all that is best in CI sport was another resounding success.

THE potential in the new Clydesdale Bank Guernsey Premier League T20 competition is vast, and not only for the good of the GCB balance sheets.

Evening cricket has become so low key and sub standard in recent times that I was beginning to wonder if the heady days of the Sarnian version of Australia’s ‘Big Bash’ would ever again capture the imagination.

But this really could be it.

Of course, certain things need to fall into place for the competition which, in a three-year deal, cricket-loving Clydesdale obviously believe is a winner, does work and makes a difference to local cricket.

Firstly, the vast majority of the island’s top players will need to play regardless of which team bids for them – and remember unlike the Indian version the player gets nothing but a free kit – and, secondly, the ‘international’ players contracted to play in the month-long weekend extravaganza, arrive really up for it and perform.

Privately, I am assured that the four, soon to be announced, will be fully committed and focused, and they need to be.

I have long tired of the half-cut, bleary-eyed players who turned up for the end-of-season county clashes when a good time was top of the agenda.

What GPL needs is not only the leading island players – the Friths, Savidents and Le Prevosts – to be producing the goods, but also the star men, all of whom will either be current county first-team regulars, or, in one case, a few months out of the game.

The players in question have the skills to light up the old KGV and, given its current state of shabbiness and the poor Evening League fare of 2010, my God it needs lighting up.

GPL has the potential to revive interest in the former gem of cricket and while it is vitally important that the new event brings in much-needed cash to the organising body of the local game, it is not nearly as vital as to spark a turnaround in this simple, knockabout form of the game which Guernsey for so long specialised in.

My hopes that GPL will not only draw some good crowds to the KGV for the Saturday triple-headers, in particular, but prove so appetising that it will leave islanders wanting to see the traditional Division One fare once again.

That might be a spot of wishful thinking, but the evening game has been dumbed down too much in recent times as the longer form of the game has become everything.

But with T20 likely to be a cash-cow at even European level in the coming years it surely makes sense that the local product is as competitive as it once proudly was.