September 23, 2005
Farewell Sport England, you had your chance and blew it
Sport England have failed to make the case for sport on the national level. They have made what could be a fatal mistake on their part. While the sports councils of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have been plying their trade proactively for their respective nations, similar support for sport at the national level in England has been a confusing affair.
The Tour of Britain, as readers are no doubt aware, was a distinctly sordid affair. It lacked an English team, which is a situation that the other nations of Britain could never entertain for their own sportsmen and women. These competitors were proud to enter the tournament and their sports organisations supported them. After all, it is part of their roll to do so. Not so with Sport England, who I can only assume found it a rather daunting task to support a national team who they considered would not be competitive either individually or collectively. They argued that [a]n England team that is not competitive would have limited impact on the sport, and potentially be detrimental.
That is a spectacular failure to grasp the very essence of why many people compete. How many times have we been told by an athlete how great it was to represent their nation? It’s fair enough to say that British athletes often mean Britain when they say this (which is after all what they are representing in most cases) but in a competition of nations within the Union what does being forced to represent the whole of the Union whilst other competitors are permitted to represent their home nations actually mean to an athlete? If it means nothing then this only highlights Sport England’s ‘magnificent’ failure.
The result of this bland performance by Sport England is beginning to surface:
Moynihan and Hoey argue for a one-stop funding agency to be called the Sports Foundation, which would be part of the Ministry of Culture, Media and Sport and chaired by the Secretary of State. All the governing bodies of sport in this country would go to that one source for funding, replacing the jungle of organisations that exists at present.Of course, they may well argue about not having influence over the organisations of devolved nations but we all know that any attempt to dissolve these other bodies would be met with a nationalist whirlwind that no politician would be prepared to weather.This would mean the end of UK Sport and Sport England, along with their regional English structures. But neither Hoey nor Moynihan wants the sports councils of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland to be disbanded.
This cannot be said of England. The lacklustre efforts by Sport England to proudly and adamantly express and support actual national sport has left them in a very weak position. There can be no whirlwind. Indeed, on quite possibly the very eve of loosing their jobs they have no moral authority to do anything other than look at their feet and whistle.
How could they argue the case for England when they have, to all intents and purposes, been part of the machinery for British sport to the detriment of the nation of England? After all, the reorganisation should, ethically, mean nothing to them.
They failed to make the case. They failed to inject that nationalistic element into their support for sport that could and probably would have warded off any attempt at a ‘hostile takeover’. They are to be fractured and absorbed into a UK sporting body and those in the takeover boardroom know that there will be little or no trouble. They could never say this about the sporting bodies of other component nations.
And what of England? Well, if this absorption goes ahead the task of building an honest to goodness national sports body will be impossible. With English consciousness on the rise it would have been an uphill struggle to change the mindset of our national bodies. A struggle but probably not impossible. At least they had the right name. If this osmosis of Sport England into the murky waters of a wider agency goes ahead we should probably all go home to lie in our beds and think of England.
Remember her?
