ENGLAND have only been in one world cup football final and, thankfully, back in 1966, they won it.

Since then they have been in more rugby world cup finals and Jonny Wilkinson’s last minute drop goal in 2003 meant that they also won that game, although since then our national rugby and football teams have not fared terribly well at world cup level.
I mention that simply because, based on the size of the Island, Jersey should never be able to compete with or against most other nations including England, with its population of 51 million.

By contrast Jersey’s population is around 90,000. So, according to the law of averages, Jersey should be well down the pecking order when it comes to taking on the best in the world and beating them.

However, over the last few years Jersey has done decidedly well in a variety of sports, ranging from power boats, and the likeable former world champion, Roy Smith, to bowls and to former world champion Lindsey Greechen (currently ranked the world’s ninth best player).

And even when we haven’t actually won a championship, the fact that we’ve made it to the latter stages or to a final suggests that our Island competitors very often punch well above their weight.

I was reminded of this twice this month; the first time when Morag Obarska had a gentle dig at me after her mixed touch team lost 7-5 to England at Glasgow, in the Home Nations championship.

‘We beat last year’s champions, Scotland, on the way through to the final,’ she explained. ‘We were also holding our own at 5-5 before, in the last five minutes, we let England in to score the last two tries. To be realistic, I don’t think that enough of the Island realises how great an achievement it is for Jersey players to climb quite so high, and to do so well against the top team from all the Home nations.’

And I was reminded of how good we are at other sports, too, this time as a collective Channel Islands’ team, for last weekend the Sportingbet Channel Islands men’s athletics team won the British Athletics League 10 in 100 Cup in Copthall, thanks, eventually, to a men’s 4x400m relay which saw Guernsey’s Dale Garland storm into the lead and hold it for a three point victory over Blackheath and Bromley.

Jersey has some world class athletes in many sports. It also has some amazingly fine sporting venues ranging from the croquet lawns at Les Quennevais, described as ‘some of the finest in the world’ by the president of the British Lawn Croquet Association, who said that only South Africa came close by comparison, to Springfield and to the pitches at Grainville and even to the rugby pitches at St Peter, including the main pitch which, a week ago, was arguably the best it has ever been.

I don’t think that even the late John Sauvage, who took such pride in his groundsmanship, could have prepared a better surface for tomorrow’s first friendly of the season, Jersey v Bournemouth.

And internally? Well, I still think that Fort Regent should be given over 100 per cent to sport – and what on earth, so many years after, will they do to the pool up there, which in my opinion should never have been closed in the first place – while our tennis and squash courts are also some of the best in Europe.

So congratulations to the Island squash authorities for enticing the British Squash Professional Association to host the UK Grand Prix Finals at the Jersey Squash Club between 3 and 5 September.

Jersey does Sport well. Very well. Yet I wonder how many politicians really understand the huge impact that sport has on the infrastructure of our society and the money that it creates for this island?

I also wonder how many politicians actually read the sports pages of the JEP. Looking through the names of our senators, deputies and constables, I can’t imagine more than a dozen of them actually reading the paper from back to front, which is how most people who enjoy their sport read any daily newspaper.

Yet sport generates money . . . a huge amount, if you look at facts on figures based on the London Olympics and the successful bid which sees the UK host the next rugby world cup, before Japan hosts the one after that. The last world cup, in France, generated £2.1 billion.

The tournament was broadcast to a global television audience of over 4 billion and the RWC 2007 enjoyed 2.2 million public ticket sales with an attendance rate of 97% for the matches in France, a full corporate sponsorship inventory and unprecedented corporate hospitality sales with over 100,000 packages sold (greater than the last two tournaments combined).

That is the kind of business Jersey could do with, even though it would obviously be on a much smaller scale . . . but the point is twofold.

First, for the size of the population we produce more world class athletes than we should, although at times we don’t praise them enough for coming second, not first.
Second, we – or rather our politicians – ought to see what better use we can make of our sports facilities, on a much wider, global basis.

And with the London Olympics less than three years away, the sooner our politicians look at how effectively they can hire out and utilise our sporting facilities, the better.

Postscript: Thank you, Dominion, for agreeing to sponsor the netball league for the next three years and also for paying towards the upkeep of a new Netball Development Officer. Hopefully, during her tenure in the office, we will unearth another Serena Guthrie who, we know, is one of England’s current best players . . . proof again that this small Island breeds athletes who continually punch above their weight.