Two weeks ago I had the pleasure of interviewing Sir Ian ‘Geech’ McGeechan who assured me that, when I spoke fondly about rugby days of the 1970s and 80s, I was looking at the past through rose-tinted spectacles.

‘The game was played at a much slower pace,’ he told me, ‘and you might not remember it, but in some games you spent more time retrieving the ball from a line-out than actually running with it in the threes!’

‘Sir Geech’ is a huge fan of the modern game and while tipping France to win the Six Nations he also said that Martin Johnson is the best coach England could have and that he expects to see him still in that position during the next Rugby World Cup.

‘He will already have the names of some of the key members he wants in his squad; players he can build a successful team around,’ he said, before we talked about his job prior to becoming a full-time paid rugby coach and manager.

‘I was a PE and geography teacher in Leeds,’ he said. ‘I had to fit all of my rugby commitments around my timetable but, for most of my rugby life, first as a player and then as a coach, I had two understanding headmasters who would allow me time off from my teaching duties. That was until they appointed a younger, more progressive head.

‘He hadn’t been in the job long before he called me into his office and told me I had to make a choice between teaching and rugby.

‘I think he was a bit surprised when I told him rugby came first. I was Scotland manager at the time and we’d just won the Grand Slam (1990).

‘Within two weeks of handing in my notice I’d had nine good offers of jobs, on the condition that I stayed on as Scotland coach!

‘There’s a unique camaraderie in the sport which, at the time, made me feel quite humble.’

I wonder if Sir Geech would have been knighted if he’d continued teaching or, come to that, if the British and Irish Lions from 1989 onwards would have been quite so successful if he hadn’t been there.

So, the John Terry/Wayne Bridge affair rumbles on and as it does so a reader, Sylvia Sutton (a mother of three), has written to me voicing sentiments I share.

One of the passages is this, about John Terry: ‘In my opinion he is not a fit person to represent our country in South Africa, or anywhere else for that matter.’

Ms Sutton explains further: ‘One of my sons, aged 8, is a Chelsea fan and I would never try to explain what Terry was up to (with another woman who wasn’t his wife).’
She has a point. For surely it is the duty of any sportsman in the public eye and supposedly the role model for thousands of young children to respect that role, especially if you are captain of the England football team.

At the time of writing Wayne Bridge has refused to talk publicly about Terry’s alleged affair with the mother of his three-year-old child and as a father myself I can understand his silence. That doesn’t mean, however, that thousands of would-be commentators haven’t seen fit to talk about the affair, including Manchester City’s Nigel de Jong for Dutch magazine Sportweek.

‘You don’t touch the wife of a team-mate,’ he said. ‘That really is a code in football. Doing something with the wife of a player from another club is something different but what Terry did is not done. They used to share the same dressing-room and they were mates.’

‘Mates’, ‘Role models’ and ‘Code of conduct’ all kind of gel together in de Jong’s philosophy, but surely when he talks about a ‘code in football’ he isn’t talking about a moral code.

All of which leads me to the key reason why I admire Bridge’s stance which in turn has led to his walking away from being part of the England team when they seek to win the Football World Cup in just over 100 days from now.

For call me the product of a bygone generation if you like, but I wonder what his three-year-old son, Jaydon, would say to his father in a few years time if he knew that Wayne had chosen to play in the same football team as the man who cuckolded his dad and, allegedly, paid for the abortion of what would have been (if the child had been allowed to live) his half-brother or sister.

So I’ll leave the last word with Sylvia Sutton when she says: ‘If this woman was forced by Terry to have had an abortion then all I can say is . . . God forbid.’

Like many other Islanders I followed the adventures of our cricket team who, in losing to Singapore last weekend, dropped from Division V to Division VI in the ICC World Cricket League at the same time that Afghanistan clinched their place in the Super Fours stage of the World Twenty20 qualifying tournament by beating the USA by 29 runs in Pakistan.

This is the same Afghan team, remember, who so nearly lost to Jersey two years ago at Grainville in a competition that saw the Island side promoted to ICC WCL Division V, and deservedly so.

It would appear that while the Afghan star is in the ascendancy, Jersey’s is heading for terra firma.

Well, maybe. But I would like to think that, in retrospect, Jersey will come away from Nepal recognizing that the last two years have shown them they are on the lower rungs of a ladder with infinite potential and that unless they have the backing of a Roman Abramovich figurehead and can buy a world-beating team, progessing up that ladder will always be a question of two steps up, one step back.

Jersey, on the whole, are a young team. Thankfully, the majority have time on their hands to build on their ability and come again. And I would like to think that for the foreseeable future both coach Craig Hogan and JCB director Chris Minty will be instrumental in guiding them a few rungs higher up that slippery ladder.

Of course they need a ‘spin doctor’ to help them cope with a spinning ball, just as they need an accomplished spinner to teach them, and to show how quickie bowlers are not always the solution on a turning pitch.

And of course Hogan is right when he says: ‘It’s okay bowling four good balls an over but it’s what happens with the other two balls that count. If you bowl two bad balls an over that are hit to the boundary that is eight runs an over you are giving away – which isn’t good.’

This, and: ‘It’s okay saying we nearly won against Bahrain but nearly is not good enough . . .’

Simple words, perhaps, but words worth saying. Playing in Nepal must have been hugely expensive not just in money terms, but also in terms of giving up their time, away from work and family, to spend weeks in preparation and then time away on another continent.

However, if Jersey seriously wants to play against national teams with a chance of winning, then surely committing themselves to the sport they love must be well worthwhile.

The Jersey Ist XV over 150 years to prove that they can play at national rather than local, county level. Let’s hope that our cricketers can go one better than that and be some kind of force on an international, rather than a minor UK-based, stage. Not, perhaps, now or tomorrow, but certainly within the lifetime of our current younger players.

Finally, she wouldn’t know it, but Lauren Therin has taken on the mantle of my former Island Supergirl heroine, Alison Christie, for her ability to turn her hand to just about any sport she wishes to play.

Alison it was, remember, who swam for Jersey, ran for Jersey and, finally, played rugby for Scotland.

As one generation fades into the past, another invariably takes over and so it is with Lauren; international athlete; bobsleigher; netballer; Island touch rugby player; and now good enough, potentially, to cycle for England.

For the 24-year-old is one of two athletes to be selected to work with Great Britain’s cycling squad after applying for the Girls4Gold UK Sport initiative last year.

From hundreds of other girls, most of whom have never competed in a cycle race in their lives, Lauren was selected because of her all-round athletic prowess and fitness levels, just as Rebecca Romero, a former Olympic medallist in rowing moved onto track cycling at the age of 26 and won her second gold medal in her new’ sport at the Beijing Olympics in 2008.

Is Lauren capable of winning a medal at the London Olympics in 2012? You’d have to be a brave man to bet against it and I, for one, will be tracking her progress with the greatest of interest.

Postscript: if I wanted decent role models for my children, ‘Sir Geech’ and Lauren Therin would be two names I’d happily endorse.