CHEATING. Big news, cheating.

At times during an eventful summer of achievement – why, we regained the Ashes and qualified for the World Cup! – every back page headline in every tabloid newspaper has had a cheats’ story over the last few months. The repercussions have been mixed.

In rugby, the Harlequins’ former coach, Dean Richards, was given a three-year worldwide ban from any involvement with the sport after one of his players, winger Tom Williams, was caught on camera taking a ‘blood’ capsule they’d bought in a joke shop and biting it, to suggest an injury that wasn’t, before he was led from the field in a game against Leinster to bring a ‘blood’ replacement on – someone whose speciality is kicking goals.

Six other officials at the club, including Chairman Charles Jillings had to resign and the doctor, Dr Wendy Chapman, who is alleged to have used a scalpel to nick Williams’ lips, to make the injury seem real, has been suspended by the General Medical Council.

‘But I was only doing what other clubs have been doing, and getting away with it, in recent years,’ said Richards afterwards, as if their getting away with it made ‘Bloodgate’ somehow right.
After that and earlier this month the genteel world of lawn bowls was brought into disrepute when the New Zealand national men’s fours’ team were accused of deliberately losing to Thailand, 17-15, in the recent Asia-Pacific Championships in Malaysia.

For although New Zealand had already qualified for the next stage in the championships, Canada said they had lost in order to gain a more favourable quarter-final draw.

Since then an independent judicial panel is ‘investigating’ a claim which has seen the four men drop out of the national team which, in turn, has prompted two-time world champion Gary Lawson to say that he has never deliberately thrown a game for any reason.

So to the most recent example of cheating – Formula 1. In this case journalists have not had to use ‘allegedly’ because Renault has admitted guilt. At the Singapore Grand Prix last year Nelson Piquet Junior was ordered to crash his car, risking his life and that of others, so that Renault’s No 1 driver, Fernando Alonso, could win from behind the safety car.

After initially arguing to the FIA’s World Motor Council that Piquet was talking nonsense, because he had been dropped from the team, the board at Renault threw their now former managing director of F1, Flavio Briatore, to the wolves plus Pat Symonds, the team’s former director of engineering.

Briatore has been banned from any involvement with racing for life and the latter faces a ban for the next five years. They also had to pay the FIA’s costs for proceedings which, according to most Formula One buffs, are around £750,000 – leniency in the extreme.

Despite describing Renault’s breach of the International Sporting Code as of ‘unparalleled severity’ and handing the company a suspended ban from Formula One until the end of 2011, their racing team has been allowed to carry on driving from now and into the foreseeable future.
Why no further, more draconian action when Piquet or another driver could have been killed? And why, come to that, weren’t Harlequins drubbed out of the Premiership for such blatant gameship?

In both cases I have been told by people much closer to the authorities than I will ever be . . . the answer is ‘money’.

‘They’d like to set an example to the other clubs by drubbing Harlequins out, but they’re one of the Premiership’s biggest draws and at a time of recession, when three of the other big name clubs are struggling, financially, they can’t afford to chuck them out of the league,’ I was told. ‘It would be too high a price for rugby to pay.’

As for Formula One? – Money again. For if Renault were dropped, the knock-on effect not only to F1 but also to Renault and their thousands of workers world-wide, would be catastrophic. The effect of a ban on a leading F1 manufacturer on a sport that attracts 350 million TV viewers across the globe would be devastating.

So, just as Dean Richards and his team had to go so that Harlequins could be re-admitted into the championship, so Briatore and Symonds had to go to allow Renault to carry on in F1.

As for Tom Williams and Piquet Junior, both of whom spilled the beans and were subsequently given immunity from prosecution because of it, their careers are over. Why? – Because they refused to stay quiet. They refused to be ‘loyal’ to their bosses.

They cheated, but then admitted their deception. And it’s for those two men that I feel most sympathy. What would you do if, earning decent money to take part in a sport you love, you were then told by your boss to ‘bend the rules a little’ knowing that if you refused to do so your lifestyle and that of your family would invariably suffer?

For the big boys, particularly those who can afford decent lawyers or who can end the game as we know it, have much more influence than us ordinary mortals. Cheating, at any level, devalues sport and turns those who would participate into cynical bystanders.

So could anything like ‘Bloodgate’ or ‘Renaultgate’ ever happen in Jersey? Well, I’d like to say no, however in any society there have been, are, and will continue to be cheats – and I can’t imagine any of our lawn bowlers deliberately throwing a game to get a better draw in the quarter-finals!

However, there have been cheats in the past; there are cheats in various sports even as I speak and I daresay there will be cheats who’ll try to get away with it in years to come.
The effect of one person’s cheating has such a profound knock-on effect that every other competitor, or team-mate, plus the sport itself, is tarnished and suffers.

Mind you, if you have enough money, I suppose you can cover over the cracks or play the word-game whereby ‘cheating’ becomes ‘gamesmanship’ or ‘playing the system’ or some other right-sounding claptrap. But in my book, a cheat’s a cheat and deserves no part in any sport where they can’t be trusted: and it only takes one blighted apple to damage the crop. Cheats, even if they are backed by millions of pounds, Must Never Prosper.

The football season is well upon us and last weekend I enjoyed the Manchester derby, the best game I’ve seen between the two sides for over a decade.

Locally, a Jersey side, managed by Jon Welsh, beat Wiltshire FA 3-0 in the second round of the National League System Cup away from home and, on the back of this success, move steadfastly on.

As I read through Jon’s interview I was much taken by what he said about his side: ‘We looked like a team that had played together before . . . the success of the Aland Island Games squad was very much in evidence (and) there is a fantastic unity among the players.And it showed.’
Ben Harvey at the rugby club talks a similar type of game – echoing the sentiment that familiarity breeds a team without stars, but players who know each other and are prepared to run their socks off for each other.

But without the National League System Cup the total number of games that a Jersey XI would have this year would probably be two … A warm-up game before the Muratti and then the inter-insular itself. Football, like all half-decent team sports in this Island need fixtures. Without fixtures, why would anyone want the Island team manager’s job anyway?

So full marks to the Dandara Jersey Football Combination’s Island representative side for their 3-0 away win and full marks to the players, the manager, the coach and organisers for making it happen. However … what, at the moment, are the JFA doing for the future good of an Island team?

Finally, news editor Carl Walker and, in the letters’ pages, Gary McDonald, have rightly bemoaned the fact that young would-be David Beckham’s only want to sign up for highly successful youth teams to such an extent that Gary writes of one club side whose players are ‘made up of players who have been rejected at most other clubs . . . and have suffered heavy defeats, losing (to more favoured sides) 14-0 and 12-0.’

There’s nothing worse, when you’re young and enthusiastic, to go into every game, not wondering by how many you’ll win by, but how many goals you’re likely to concede.
Perhaps the authorities should put a cap on the number of ‘good’ players any side should have. But how do you define a very ‘good’ youth player?

Yes, the clubs themselves ought to be big-hearted enough to ensure that in any youth division no one team will thrash another. If they don’t, then promising young players will drift away from the game. In my days at Les Quennevais School and manager of the under-15 B-team, if we were thrashing a team, we’d simply swap some of our players for theirs.

However – and this is scarce consolation to anyone – in terms of real life experiences, if you’re losing all the time but you love what you’re doing, you have to persevere. Eventually the ‘best’ teams will hit some sort of crisis – by which time the underdog, as underdogs are want to do, will have their day.