THE whiteout afflicting the central belt right now might be great news for luge enthusiasts but for the rest of Scotland’s sporting fraternity it is nothing but an inconvenience. Whether you are a footballer, rugby player, tennis player, a fun runner or merely a member of the community intent on getting yourself moving again, your plans have probably been compromised by the snow and ice which has caused training sessions to be cancelled, matches to be postponed, and underfoot conditions to become treacherous. Even Scotland’s top-flight football clubs, who must have hoped to have missed all this by jetting out to destinations like Dubai, Florida or Marbella, haven’t been immune.
Don’t get me wrong: the winter break, at least for those teams who can afford it, helps. And most youth football in Scotland, thanks to Project Brave, moves to a summer season in 2018, a move I feel is long overdue. Because, while the snow will – probably – be gone in a week, the rain, wind and cold won’t. And in general terms we still play too much of football when the weather conditions can be expected to be at their worst. This compromises the quality of our pitches, leading many teams to do anything but get the ball down and play. Thus playing through the winter affects the entire character of our sport and it is little wonder we are getting left behind when it comes to technical skills.
The weather is just one obstacle to be overcome if you want to make it from Scotland to become a world class sportsperson, mind you. As the blizzards struck the country this week, it got me thinking about what other elements must still be tackled if we want to improve the long-range forecast for our nation’s sporting prospects.
There is a piece of homespun wisdom about ‘the cream always rising to the top’ but in fact it seems to me that is anything but the truth. Take Andy Murray for example. Clearly a gifted athlete with a huge work ethic and great hand-eye co-ordination, would he have become the world class phenomenon he is today without the tennis savvy of his parents, and their willingness to sacrifice time and their own hard cash to get him out to Spain to sample world class competition as a teenager? Scotland may yet produce another top tennis player – Glaswegian teenager Aidan McHugh has a shot – but Murray developed in spite of the system, not because of it.
Depressingly, when you consider the various factors ranged against our aspiring young people, that often still seems to be the case. On Saturday, I attended the last-ever Great Edinburgh International Cross Country, which will be moving from Holyrood Park to pastures new from 2019 after the decision of City of Edinburgh Council to pull funding in the region of £100,000 for an occasion which is one of the few world class sporting events hosted in Scotland, and one with a demonstrable knack of exposing our young athletes to this calibre of event.
Hopes are high that another council area in Scotland will pick up the baton but that hardly seems the point. And judging by the palaver it took to get Judy Murray’s tennis base at the Park of Keir signed off, Edinburgh is not the only one of Scotland’s councils who often have to be persuaded about the merits of sports funding. For all the central UK Sport funding available for established medal potential athletes, certain sports governing bodies rail about how much more they could do for their up-and-coming athletes with more guaranteed, long-term funding and a less hand-to-mouth existence.
At least in sports like rugby union, where the association controls the pro clubs, there is a smooth pathway. In football, unless you have the charmed existence of a Kieran Tierney or Ross McCrorie, our young players can be caught in the crossfire between clubs and a football association who often seem to be at cross purposes. Witness a club like Falkirk, with an SFA performance school in the town and a track record of bringing through players which is the envy of most, pulling funding to the Forth Valley academy to focus resources on their first team. Surely this wasn’t the SFA’s intention when they first embarked on Project Brave. Perhaps they think the cream will always rise to the top. But in Scotland, don’t bet on it.
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