NOT by my own choice, but certainly by others, I have been asked to begin this week’s column with my thoughts about one of Abu Dhabi’s richest men, billionaire Sheik Mansour, who offered £100m-plus to take Kaka from AC Milan to Manchester City. Is it good for football? I was asked. And where do I stand, either for it or against.

Perhaps the answer lies in my huge reluctance these days to write anything about Premier League football. The JFA and the Coca-Cola Combination league, yes – because for all of the pitfalls they might fall into, I respect the efforts that the Island football authorities make for their sport. Divisions beneath the Premiership, yes again, because most of them are English clubs in an English Division. But with regard to the Premiership . . .

Kaka, I believe, is an honourable man. He doesn’t play solely to earn money. He never wanted to leave Milan because money isn’t a god to him. Instead, he gives a tenth of his earnings to the church and, according to most recent reports, believes that family and God are agreed he should not leave Italy to go to Manchester. Almost as an aside, he maintains that he plays football for the enjoyment of the game.

Half a million pounds a week to kick around a football hasn’t proved attractive enough for him to leave Milan.
So let me take you to a windy under-18 Tregear Cup game on Sunday at Les Quennevais when St Brelade’s forced their way into the semi-finals by beating St Peter 4-0.

Afterwards the winning manager, Mark Kelly, was complimentary about both teams, before he had a real moan at the ref. ‘Four bookings,’ he said, ‘in a game which was played in just about the best spirit you can get. And do you know how much each of those bookings will cost their club? – £8 each. What’s the justice in that? – I’m not accusing referees of inconsistency.

They’ve been bad in most of the games we’ve played in! But £8 per player? That’s a lot of money for a small club like us!’ Eight pounds for a Jersey junior’s booking; £500,000 a week if you’re called Kaka and wanted by Sheik Mansour to play for Manchester City. So yes, I do consider the millions that were offered for the Brazilian not only to be obscene, but to be hideously obscene.

To begin with, the owners of a club who can pay out money like that can behave like kids in a cookie store whenever the doors are opened (like now, in the January sales) and they can simply ransack the assets of any league side by offering huge amounts of money for their best players. Gianfranco Zola pointed this out at West Ham but it didn’t do him much good. £10m for Craig Bellamy? – No, not enough. £12m, £15m, £20m . . . Eventually the moneymakers step in and another soul is transferred from one club to another. Everyone, it seems, has a price.

For at some stage a club’s owner feels obliged to sell, which in turn means that managers become superfluous, because all they do is coach a football team. They, like their players, can be bought and sold based purely on a whim. Meanwhile, when the owners get fed up of this hobbyhorse and move on to something else, what then?
Not one person I’ve spoken to has thought that so much money pumped into kicking a football around is worth it. And, reluctant as I am, I have to agree with them. For a year I lived on the Manchester United/Man City divide. I’d watch City, rather than United at a time when 40 quid a week was a decent wage.

And now? How many of us can even imagine earning £500,000 in a lifetime, never mind a week. Of course it’s obscene. Not for the players or managers but certainly for the owners, and the sooner they are kicked out of the Premiership, the better. Call me a Little Englander, but I don’t want foreign money to be running any of the clubs I follow. And as for £103 m, just for one guy who happens to be a half-decent-footballer. I can think of a zillion better ways of spending my money.

Frame of mind key in snooker final stages
THE last time I stayed up past my bedtime to watch a game of snooker long into the night was when Dennis Taylor beat Steve Davies at the Crucible in the final of the world championship in April, 1985.

For information 18.5 million people watched that final on BBC2; a sporting contest that ultimately lasted 14 hours and 50 minutes and was decided at the end, in a 35-frame match, on Taylor’s nerveless shot on the black.

And that may well have been the only time I stayed up so late, simply to watch a game played on a bit of sticky-back felt on a 12ft x 6ft slate base, supported by six carved legs on a table no bigger than two or three window boxes glued together. But then, on Sunday night, for some reason I began watching the Masters competition at the indoor Wembley arena and, bit by bit, I found myself being drawn in.

For the final two games were just about as good as snooker gets and it really did enthral me as much as Steve Davis’ battle 24 years ago. Mark Selby should have won, but didn’t. Ronnie O’Sullivan should never have won, but by keeping his cool, did so. Ignore the skills both players undoubtedly have. Consider instead the extraordinary mind games that must have been going on in each man’s head at the time. For this wasn’t ordinary sport. This was a mindset where the guy with the clearest head had the best chance of winning.

It turned out to be O’Sullivan. And it was, to the bitter end, more theatre than sport: more Hamlet than Hull Kingston Rovers; more King Lear than Luton Town, more Bronte sisters than Bath. In short, the sheer willpower of both of these guys was tested to the limit. Great snooker players take what used to be a male preserve, played in a stuffy hall or in the backroom of an upper class drawing room to new heights.

Snooker, at its best, makes for great drama and I couldn’t have been the only one to be gripped, long into the night, by the tensions of two men at the heights of their playing powers but arguably suspect when it came to their mental fragility. The best man won. Not through his skill, but because he was mentally tougher than the guy he was playing against.

Driven to point of distraction
DID you know that golf could make you go deaf? – Neither did I, until I read recently that modern titanium clubs create a ‘sonic boom’ when their owners connect with the ball, which could threaten their hearing and also the hearing of anyone else in the near vicinity.

Don’t believe me? This is what Scotland’s Dr Malcolm Buchanan says on the subject: ‘Our results show that thin-faced titanium drivers may produce sufficient sound to induce temporary or even permanent cochlear damage in susceptible individuals. Players should be careful when playing with these thin-faced clubs as they make a lot of noise.’ Apparently the worst offending golf club is the Ping G-10.

Well, in certain schools they’ve banned conkers. Ping-pong can be dangerous if you fall over and bang your head on a radiator. Darts is obviously a dangerous sport because you’re playing with lethal weapons (how DO darts players get away with taking their equipment with them onto a plane?) so |I guess it’s time to limit golf, too, and go back to the days of wooden headed mashies and niblicks. (Well, perhaps not. But it’s only once in a decade that I get to use the words ‘mashies’ and ‘niblicks’ in any article in the JEP.)

U18s on a big stage
ULTIMATELY, organisations don’t make sport happen. People do. So thank you, Iain Mackenzie and Paul Sowney for bringing the rising stars of the Republic of Ireland and Northern Island to these shores to take part in a three-nation under-18 football tournament between 2-4 February.

Jersey will be represented and although this has been described as ‘a mini’ tournament, the Scottish Football Association are sending an observer down which is potentially either extremely good news or, potentially, very bad, depending on what happens over that three-day period. For although I have no doubt that he will be impressed by the hospitality and the facilities, he will also be judging the quality of the teams he has come to watch.

In other words, if the Jersey under-18s prove to be formidable opposition when they play against the two Irish teams, I have no doubt that the Scottish FA will be in touch again. If they under-perform (and in terms of talent, if not fitness, there is no reason to suggest they won’t), then Scotland will look somewhere else.
Thank you, Iain and Paul for your efforts and enthusiasm. I’ll be there. As for the under-18s Jersey side? – Well, the answer to this comment piece won’t be decided now, but will be, come that first week in February.

I’ll miss this man
FOR 26 years I knew Bob Blake, a very modest man whose pride was first in family, second in sport and only third, I suspect, in earning a living.

Money was never the be all and end all to his existence although, in a quirky kind of way, he loved money, which is why I first came to know him through his passion for banknotes for he knew the history of Jersey currency inside out and his eyes lit up at the prospect of talking to a captive audience (me) when given the chance to talk on the subject.

He was a lovely man, who apologised when my notebook was over-crammed with currency overflow before, in a different guise, he reintroduced himself to me as a shooter. And damned good he was at that, too. And my abiding memory of Bob isn’t that of a collector of obsolete pound notes or even as a winner of medals. Instead, it is as the kit man, who drove long distances, uncomplainingly, to one Island Games venue after another.

He deservedly won the Sid Guy Memorial Award for his services to sport last year and, in the years to come, I shall miss him and his very waspish sense of humour. Breakfasts, without Bob Blake alongside Derek Bernard and Dave Ward on an Island Games ‘away day’ will never be the same.