IT’S been a horrendous week for followers of both rugby and football – the one still held back by bungling amateurism, the other hamstrung by egos and greed.
The France Ireland rugby international was called off six minutes before kick-off at the weekend. It fell to an official to make the announcement to a Stade de France stadium full of 80,000 fans, 5,500 of whom had travelled over from Ireland at considerable expense.
As the announcement was made, the pre-match band was still standing on the pitch, waiting to perform the national anthems. The result was a PR disaster with scenes which were farcical, absurd and most frustrating of all, avoidable.
To date the IRFU has said it “regrets” what happened, but there has been no apology from the French or the Six Nations.
Two things stand out here. All major international sporting venues in areas which have cold winters should have either undersoil heating or an adequate alternative. Stade de France, although a relatively new and magnificent stadium does not have this.
This makes it even more remarkable that the match was being played at 9pm in the middle of a fiercely cold spell that had lasted at least a week. The game could and should have either been postponed days before it was due to have been played or, at the very least rescheduled for another time of day.
Apparently the Six Nations did not have the authority to do either of these things – matches can only be postponed by the host nation, or the referee on the day.
This needs to be changed. Rugby is making great strides as a spectacle and this sort of farce cannot be allowed to happen again.
Meanwhile, back at home, Ulster Rugby is still coping with the repercussions of the Brian McLaughlin affair. This again demonstrates the need for higher levels of professionalism in the sport.
The dilemma the club faced is easy enough to understand. It is setting itself the challenge of becoming one of the best clubs in the world and wants the best of everything – including the head coach.
McLaughlin may not have a world-beating CV but he has done a remarkable job in the past two years, steering Ulster to two successive Heineken Cup quarter finals and forging his side into one of the most feared in Europe.
Announcing that he is to be demoted before the end of the season before a replacement has been recruited was not an especially smart move for all sorts of reasons not least of which is the pressure put on his eventual successor.
Making a success out of coaching elite sport depends on so many variables – it’s not just about how good you are, it’s also about the strength and depth of your squad, the infrastructure around you, the chemistry between your staff and the players, and a million-and-one other things, not least of which is the comparative strength of your opponents.
Success cannot be guaranteed and history is littered with examples of brilliant coaches who have not worked out in new posts. If Ulster is to become the world’s best club they will have to manage their affairs a little better than this.
Then there is football. At the weekend the Liverpool striker Luis Suarez besmirched the game when he refused to shake Patrice Evra’s hand, after serving a ban for racially abusing Evra. His actions simultaneously undermined the Football Association’s efforts to promote respect between teams, players, officials and supporters and its campaign against racism in sport.
The following day the Manchester City striker Carlos Tevez before returning from his self-imposed exile in Argentina said that his manager Roberto Mancini had treated him “like a dog”. Mancini’s crime? To fine him for refusing to play in a crucial Champions’ League match which City lost.
The football press rather quaintly always cites players’ salaries by weekly rates, as if they were factory workers in the 1950s. Tevez is reputedly paid £250,000 per week. That equates to £12 million per annum, Suarez a more modest £3.8 million.
Given the quite justifiable furore about executive pay, is it not time we switched our attention to the appalling, egocentric multi- millionaires in football? How can we justify their salaries – especially when many of the businesses who employ them are not sustainable in the long run.
In any event administrators in both sports need to take a long hard look at themselves if they are to retain popularity during such straightened economic times.