SPORTING DAZE

Two events combined recently to bring sporting gloom to the country, namely England's failure to progress beyond the first round in the World Cup, and an Ofsted report which hit out at a lack of sports provision at State schools. I dare say this latter statement, particularly, will have been met in many educational quarters with guffaws or even curled lips, because to my way of thinking sports provision in State schools has been tailing away since at least the 1970s.
In 1951, when I was 16, I left my Lincolnshire secondary modern school to enter the world of work having previously 'enjoyed,' on average, a gym period twice a week; regular football training and coaching (sometimes by former League players; I can remember two visiting ex-pros, one from QPR and another from Crystal Palace), plus matches during school time and on Saturday mornings; cricket nets at lunchtime and inter-house cricket matches during the afternoons with school cricket matches on Saturday mornings; a lunchtime inter-house rounders competition; and regular athletics coaching (running, high jump, long jump, javelin, etc) for those who wanted it, culminating in the inter-house school championships on a sports day held just before the end of the summer term. There was also an inter-house handball league played in the gym.
A few years ago, however, when I was invited back to hand out the end of term prizes - my first visit there for 50 years - I was astonished to learn that the house system had been dismantled in the intervening years and the houses abolished, and that no competitive sports were played at all. So tales of glory and past battles in football, cricket, rounders, handball and athletics between Byrd, Hatfield, Godric and Jonson, which so enriched our youth in the late 1940s and early 1950s, would really not have been understood at all by my audience.
How did this situation arise? Well, I can't speak for any school in particular because I really don't know the inside story of each school, but I'm guessing generally that, as the years rolled by, it went something like this.
In the 1970s many cash-strapped schools were offered a way out by being granted permission to cash in on the development potential of their playing fields. Then, of course, groundsmen came to be seen as something of a luxury, and cricket pitches in particular became too difficult to maintain. Parents who knew their 'rights' also knew how to get Wayne and Lisa out of games lessons if their little treasures didn't want to get muddy or sweaty. Then, overworked teachers began to question having to organise sports events in their own time, particularly on Saturday mornings. Also, there was the ever present threat of legal action if a pupil playing (for example) football at school bruised his knee, cut his finger, or worse, broke a bone. And for the pupils, there was also the persistent and persuasive distraction of the television screen and other digital bits of a similar ilk.
There was also a curious attempt by some schools to try to make sure that every pupil actually tried every sport. Just once. Whether they wanted to or not. It was doomed to failure.
And so in this manner, and in general, competitive sport slowly died.
How do we turn around this tide of sporting lethargy? Is it important to do so? Well, we regularly decide that it is important every time England fail in the World Cup, the cricket team loses the Ashes, or Ofsted produces another similar report highlighting the system's inefficiencies.
Cricket, it seems to me, has been particularly hard hit, and few youngsters seem to play the game nowadays. Which is a shame. And soccer may find itself running short of young players soon. But until a way is found to restore sport in State schools to at least its 1950s levels, matters will only get worse.