SPECTATOR SPORT
A nation mourns
Frank Keating
A SOLITARY piper's lament which pref- aced the pin-drop silence of a throng of 45,000 at Old Trafford on Saturday was far more touching than all the acres of grieving gush churned out in the obituary columns to the grand eminence Sir Matt Busby, whose death cued in another wail for the demise of sporting goodness similar to that with which the nation mourned Bobby Moore and Danny Blanchflower last year.
Certainly there is an understandable per- ception that British sports administration is adrift and rudderless in general, and down- right immoral in a few particular cases. The sports minister, Ian Sproat, was due offi- cially to address a meeting of leading sportswriters on Thursday. We will know by now what he told this sceptical bunch of hacks, but the betting was that they would listen, sigh wearily, and then make for the bar pronto to unscramble their shorthand enough to cobble up a couple of down-page paragraphs of anodyne exhortation from an amateur scout-leader.
One of Mr Sproat's qualifications for the Job — his brief, lamentably for sport, also includes tourism and something called `leisure' 7- was doubtless that he was founder and once editor of The Cricketers' Who's Who. He is the third (or is it fourth?) sports minister to be appointed in three Years, which is a scandal in itself. Who were
his four predecessors, you may well be ask- ing? Good question. You can more proba- bly and readily name the British tennis players who have won a match at Wimble- don in that time. (Around the same num- ber, I suspect.) Had he been unaware of it, Mr Sproat would have been told on Thursday how much of British sports administration is in an unholy mess, riddled with untrained and often geriatric incompetence and shot through with greed. Well-meaning jobs- worths, small-town blazered burghers and tinpot time-servers — whose committees have arbitrarily and avuncularly run their sports down the century — are seen now to be wretchedly out of their depth, in most cases floundering in a murky, shark-infest- ed ocean of conmen.
In British athletics, the back-page head- lines are black with stories of suicide and alleged blackmail. Professional football's charades in attempting to find a new man-
ager of the England team have been gorm- lessly inept and pleasing only to connois- seurs of Carry On films. Rugby union con- tinues its `shamateue hypocrisies alongside its policies of apartheid over rugby league. Cricket's ball-tampering cover-up continues to stink. Amateur boxing is in turmoil over `mismanagement of finances', and even judo, Britain's most successful recent Olympic sport, has been lately riddled with resignations and recriminations.
There can be a different way. The gentle and erudite Dave Sexton, a successor of Busby's at Manchester United, wrote one of the obituaries in the Guardian last week. He quoted the Chinese philosopher Lao- tzu: 'Kindness in words creates confidence. Kindness in thought creates insight. Kind- ness in giving creates love.' The first sen- tence, wrote Sexton, illustrates how Busby got his teams to play so resplendently; the second shows how he disciplined and organised their endeavours; and the third why Sir Matt himself was so generally loved.
Another friend, later in the week, wrote a piece likening a present headlined sports manager and administrator to the popular television character and spiv Arthur Daley. The lawyer was worried and excised the ref- erence. 'I suppose you're right,' sighed my pal. 'Arthur Daley would certainly have had an excellent case for libel, wouldn't he?'
Previous page
