As I write this, a mate of mine is in Turkey watching Stoke City play Beskitas.
It is the last game of the Europa League group stages and this mate of mine has been to three away games so far in the groups and the qualifiers.
Last week Stoke boss Tony Pulis announced to supporters that he was going to play a weakened team in the match. His side are already through to the last 32 and tonight’s result doesn’t really matter.
He made this announcement he said “so that fans who were going to Turkey knew that a full strength side wasn’t going to be played.”
Leaving aside the arguments surrounding this – it’s a load of nonsense for two reasons: 1) Travel plans would have been made way in advance of this (as another football supporting friend said about a trip to Barrow to watch his team “its not the sort of place you go by mistake.”) and 2) The fans that are going to Turkey 11 days before Christmas are the sort of fans who live for their club and wouldn’t care less what team was picked.
It does lead me to question something I have been thinking for a while: Are cup competitions pointless these days?
Gone are the days when the FA Cup was the biggest sporting event of the year, the Carling Cup is an inconvenience to most clubs and the Johnstone’s Paint Trophy (the only chance, most lower league clubs get to play at Wembley has been treated with contempt, most notably by Sheffield Wednesday boss Gary Megson, who got round the rules that teams have to play six of the team from the previous week by making three substitutions in the first 10 minutes of a game with Bradford.
This weakened team issue is not a new one, in previous Europa Leagues Gary Megson again – this blog is not attack a man I have a lot of time for – rested his Bolton squad ahead of a crucial relegation battle and Martin O’Neil gave the Aston Villa youth team a run out, ironically enough before a game with Stoke. Villa were gunning for a place in the top four at the time and they were two up in that game with the Potters with two minutes left. Unbelievably they were pegged back to 2-2 and ended up staggering home in the rest of the season.
Similarly Spurs attitude to the Europa League has been disdainful at best and downright disrespectful at worst, with a succession of young players have played and Tottenham are more or less out of the competition.
Of course, you can’t blame the managers. Well all know that at Premier league level the monetary rewards are massive, but that is equally true lower down too. Taking Sheffield Wednesday as the example, there would a lot more money, long term in the club beginning their rise back up the leagues than there would be in a JPT final win.
Manager’s often say they want to win every game they play, but do they? Would Harry Redknapp care if Tottenham lose tomorrow? Would Tony Pulis mind too much if Stoke lose tonight?
And if the answer is no, then how much longer – really – do the cups have left?
Wednesday 14 December 2011
Thursday 8 December 2011
Sisters Are Doing It For Themselves - Largely Because They've Got To
The BBC Sports Personality of the year award (SPOTY for short – when did that happen?!) shortlist was announced last week and it caused tremendous consternation.
It turned out that there were no women in the running for the award, which lets be honest is a total disgrace.
There was – rightly – much outrage at decision. Great Britain has four world female champions, Chrissie Wellington, the world leading tri-athlete, rower Kath Grainger and swimmers Becky Adlington and Kerri-Anne Payne. None of these ladies appear when there are places for the likes of Andy Murray. Not really very clever on the face of it.
There was also much discussion about the way the decision was made. Leading Newspapers and magazines were asked to name 10 sports people each, from which the shortlist was created.
Somebody thought it was a good idea to let Nuts and Zoo vote in this cross-section and therefore it’s hardly a surprise that these magazines didn’t cast many votes for women is it?
Women themselves veered from calm – Kerri Anne Payne tweeting “Thank you so much for all your tweets! We don't need awards just the support from the Great British public! So keep it coming :)" To more outraged, with Wellington saying it was “disgraceful.”
Even BBC presenters criticised the list, with Gabby Logan saying the shortlist was “backward” and Claire Balding joining her.
So it appears on this issue the BBC got it wrong, but doesn’t that rather miss the point?
Isn’t this issue symptomatic of a much bigger problem and one which the venerable former Paraolympian Tanni Grey-Thompson touched on when she told BBC Sport wouldn't want tokenism and I wouldn't want a woman to be on the list just because she was a woman,"
"But I think you just look at where the nominations have come from and that highlights another problem really - only 2% of media coverage in sport goes to women.
"Women just aren't on the minds, whether it's editors or in some case producers, it's just not there ... you're fighting against the system all the time where it's the big sports all the time that get the recognition."
But really, how hard should it be in this day and age for a women to get recognised for her sporting achievement? Wisden, the cricket bible, picked Charlotte Edwards as one of their Five Cricketers of the year in 2009 and in doing so she became the first women to get that accolade. The English women’s cricket team has been one of the best in the world in recent years and yet their T20 matches in the summer were played before the men’s games at the same venues later in the day. So that some of the finest sports people in the world at their particular discipline were reduced to playing almost as a warm-up act like some young, up and coming band at a festival. The same fate is to befall the female footballers at the Olympics.
The people behind this scheduling (I saw a chap from the England and Wales Cricket Board defending it earlier in the year) say that it is to give greater exposure to the sport, but to me, having the games going on while people are streaming in through the gates to watch a “big” game later, says – at the very least implicitly – that the women’s match is somehow not as important, some sort of second-class event.
And it is this form of almost institutional sexism that needs to be dealt with before we can past the bluster of last week.
Last week was in actuality a pretty good PR Coup for the BBC. SPOTY has been on the wane in recent years and is no longer the staple of the festive season that it once was, and at least people are talking about it again.
What’s the old line about all publicity being good publicity? I’ll bet if you asked them candidly, the BBC can’t believe their luck.
It turned out that there were no women in the running for the award, which lets be honest is a total disgrace.
There was – rightly – much outrage at decision. Great Britain has four world female champions, Chrissie Wellington, the world leading tri-athlete, rower Kath Grainger and swimmers Becky Adlington and Kerri-Anne Payne. None of these ladies appear when there are places for the likes of Andy Murray. Not really very clever on the face of it.
There was also much discussion about the way the decision was made. Leading Newspapers and magazines were asked to name 10 sports people each, from which the shortlist was created.
Somebody thought it was a good idea to let Nuts and Zoo vote in this cross-section and therefore it’s hardly a surprise that these magazines didn’t cast many votes for women is it?
Women themselves veered from calm – Kerri Anne Payne tweeting “Thank you so much for all your tweets! We don't need awards just the support from the Great British public! So keep it coming :)" To more outraged, with Wellington saying it was “disgraceful.”
Even BBC presenters criticised the list, with Gabby Logan saying the shortlist was “backward” and Claire Balding joining her.
So it appears on this issue the BBC got it wrong, but doesn’t that rather miss the point?
Isn’t this issue symptomatic of a much bigger problem and one which the venerable former Paraolympian Tanni Grey-Thompson touched on when she told BBC Sport wouldn't want tokenism and I wouldn't want a woman to be on the list just because she was a woman,"
"But I think you just look at where the nominations have come from and that highlights another problem really - only 2% of media coverage in sport goes to women.
"Women just aren't on the minds, whether it's editors or in some case producers, it's just not there ... you're fighting against the system all the time where it's the big sports all the time that get the recognition."
But really, how hard should it be in this day and age for a women to get recognised for her sporting achievement? Wisden, the cricket bible, picked Charlotte Edwards as one of their Five Cricketers of the year in 2009 and in doing so she became the first women to get that accolade. The English women’s cricket team has been one of the best in the world in recent years and yet their T20 matches in the summer were played before the men’s games at the same venues later in the day. So that some of the finest sports people in the world at their particular discipline were reduced to playing almost as a warm-up act like some young, up and coming band at a festival. The same fate is to befall the female footballers at the Olympics.
The people behind this scheduling (I saw a chap from the England and Wales Cricket Board defending it earlier in the year) say that it is to give greater exposure to the sport, but to me, having the games going on while people are streaming in through the gates to watch a “big” game later, says – at the very least implicitly – that the women’s match is somehow not as important, some sort of second-class event.
And it is this form of almost institutional sexism that needs to be dealt with before we can past the bluster of last week.
Last week was in actuality a pretty good PR Coup for the BBC. SPOTY has been on the wane in recent years and is no longer the staple of the festive season that it once was, and at least people are talking about it again.
What’s the old line about all publicity being good publicity? I’ll bet if you asked them candidly, the BBC can’t believe their luck.
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