GIVE me a five-day Test Match over that IPL rubbish any day.

That said, I find myself increasingly excited about the impending Guernsey version of the IPL, minus the dancing girls and the screaming crowds.

The Clydesdale Bank GPL springs into life in six days time and given a fair forecast promises to be the sporting event of the month or, should I say, until the Island Games gets under way on the 25th.

I’d be guessing if I were to write the GPL is about to change the face of island cricket but it does, no doubt, have an important role to play, not so much for fuddy-duddies like myself but the hundreds of island youngsters coming through the sport’s development system.

To think, that when I popped up, or is pupped up, in the Evening League in 1971, I was probably one of no more than half-a-dozen 14-year-olds being introduced to senior cricket.

These days we are talking many dozen coming into the senior game every year.

The Guernsey Cricket Board are about to reap the benefits of a development scheme which could underpin the domestic game for decades.

While GPL is making the headlines with four high-class professionals heading four evenly-picked [let's hope] franchises, behind the scenes an arguably bigger success story is the introduction of the new under-15s league which boasts seven sides each the responsibility of a top club.

All told, 90 boys are playing in that league, and they do not include eight of the very best of the age-group which are playing at a higher level.

That 90 is not a one-off number either.

When that group move onto to full integration into senior cricket, they will be replaced by just as many currently playing in the under-12s. And, lo and behold, there is a similar amount in the next age-group down – the under-nines.

These are remarkable stats which come at an ideal time for the game and an evening league which had been dying on its legs.

So while the demise of Grant Thornton from Division One is a disappointment, it just maybe the last nail in the short game’s coffin and after this year the traditional game will return from the dead, new life breathed into it by the GCB development scheme, senior clubs focused on bringing through talent both for their own and the individual player’s purpose, and the all-singing, all-dancing GPL.

Let’s hope so.

THE worst news of the week just had to be the reports of Ben Coulter’s latest knee injury, one which could lead to another major operation and the best part of a year out of the game.

If so, it is both sad and unfair.

What football fans don’t see and may not know is just how much this every-cheery, likeable 22-year-old puts into becoming a top island footballer.

On match days they see a midfielder with box-to-box capability not seen the heyday of Matt Warren: a player who gives it all, is a team player and impeccably behaved.

What they don’t see is, during the week, a young man who away from club training puts in hours of hard gym work to get the best out of himself and keep the wolves who prey on broken knees, away.

The gym work has done the world of good for his initial troublesome knee, and now he will have to start all over again with hours, days and weeks of rehab on the other one.

Sport can be so cruel and have no regard to the efforts of the individual.

But I’m confident that even should Coulter receive the news he dreads, that being the need for an operation, he has the character and support of family and friends to return the knee to full strength.

I HEAR the GFA are to appoint a new supreme of youth football to oversee the development of the island’s representative players.

Excellent. Let’s face it, something had to be done, our record at under-21, under-18 and under-16 levels has been vastly inferior to that of Jersey for a long while, despite improved results this past season.

Apparently, the individual concerned will have power to appoint coaches to all the youth age-groups sides and provide a link to Tony Vance the senior coach, but he won’t necessarily coach any or all of the sides involved.

As yet, I know not who the individual they have in mind, but I think there is probably only one man for the job. His name: Steve Ogier.

THAT a leading Guernsey rugby official took issue with this column’s post Siam comments did not come as a surprise.

And Charles McHugh, head of the sport’s fast-rising Academy, made many very valid points while underlining it is now an unfair contest in terms of rugby development across the islands.

A also agree that both the GRUFC first XV and Academy should be judged on their progress in the RFU leagues, rather than benchmarked against one match against Jersey, but the point I was trying to make was simply that Guernsey should aim as high as it can within its own resources.

Those resources [money basically] may be limited at present but that is not to say the budget cannot one day be increased and, I suggest, as the Academy gets ever stronger, which it shows all signs of doing, ever-bigger sponsorship deals may result.

There is nothing wrong with aiming high as Jersey RUFC and now Guernsey FC have.