By Matthew O`Connor
OVER the past few weeks I've had the pleasure of interviewing a few of the great names in sport. People who know their individual sports inside out and are thoroughly qualified to comment on how British sport can go forward and start to compete with the likes of America and Australia. It was extremely interesting to hear the views of people like 1966 World Cup winner Alan Ball, three-time Wimbledon champion Boris Becker, former British Davis Cup captain David Lloyd and Jimmy Hill, a man who has held almost every position in English football from player to coach to chairman. It was especially interesting that from all four came four very specific areas where British sports can improve:
1. More sport in schools.
2. Improve the coaching.
3. Focus on other, more successful, countries.
4. Improve the system, i.e. money is being spent poorly or on the wrong things.
The first point is a big sticking point with myself. Schools in Britain no longer allow time for sporting activities and when they do they are overseen by unqualified instructors, unlike here in Spain where each sport is taken by a teacher qualified in that individual sport. Jimmy Hill's suggestion that British schools start earlier in the morning so that there is time in the afternoon for training is an excellent idea.
The weather is obviously one problem with starting school earlier in England. How many kids would moan about getting up at seven in the morning when its pouring down with rain or snow outside? Probably quite a lot, mainly because they are not used to it. However, if kids started school at 7.30am they can be done by 2pm and then have the remainder of the afternoon to concentrate on sports or other activities especially as parents are not generally home that early in the day. This also rules out the need to combine sports at school, something that is extremely limited at the moment. By playing sports for a few hours in the evening not only does it give the kids some kind of focus it also tires them out for the rest of the day, surely not a bad thing considering the amount of crime committed by youngsters in the evenings. Coaching, the second point, has always been a problem in England. For example, in football there is no necessary qualification to coach a premier league team. David Moyes at Everton is the only fully qualified FIFA coach in the Premiership. Now, it doesn't necessarily follow that you cannot be a good coach without strict qualifications, however the chances of being a better coach is obviously higher with the best qualifications. It is a fallacy to say a football player straight out of his career can go immediately into coaching or management. Look at Bryan Robson, a great player, but he had no idea when it came to coaching. Very few sports in Britain can boast coaches of a world standard, coaches who have taken sportspeople to the highest level. Many of the British Olympic champions from the Sydney 2000 Games were coached by foreigners. A change in the laws in British sport is needed so that coaches even at the lowest levels at least have some basic knowledge of physiology and the sport that they are coaching or teaching. One thing the British, and especially the English, think is that they are always right. We invented football so we know all there is to know about the sport', etc. It's complete rubbish. Britain should not be too proud to look to countries that are successful in given sports and take and then develop some of their ideas. One thing Boris Becker recommended the British Lawn Tennis Association to do was to study the programmes set up in Spain and Argentina. The Spanish, at time of writing, have four players in the French Open quarter-finals. Britain, as usual, has none. Spain also has a number of highly talented youngsters coming through as the next generation. Britain has none. How can this be when Wimbledon creates millions of pounds each year to invest in the sport? Basically because money is being spent on a system that doesn't work. Look to what the Spanish are doing in tennis, or Brazil in football, or Australia in swimming and then invest in the same kind of strategies. This leads me onto the final point; that the system is wrong. This not only applies to tennis, but many other sports and comes down to what Will Carling would call the Old Farts. It was something about which David Lloyd felt particularly strongly. Too many people running British sporting federations are doddery old men and women who have little interest in elite sport. Nothing against the old, but many are stuck in their ways and believe the things they were doing 40 years ago to still be the best. Times change, people need to also as do systems. Too many of the people involved in running British sport are only interested in their tickets to Wimbledon, their VIP box seat at the Cup final etc. More money is spent on the five star hotel for the AGM than is put towards youth development and this needs to change. One way forward in this respect would be a total overhaul with bright new faces who are highly passionate about their sport replacing the older generation. Until some of the above points are taken seriously British sport will remain in the mediocre state in which it finds itself.