Journalism

The BOA chairman and former minister of sport talks about the boycott of the Moscow Olympics, his hopes for London 2012 and the ‘worst statistic in sport’

FT

Lord Moynihan’s home presents a peculiar problem. Situated just outside Tunbridge Wells in Kent, it is not difficult to find, nor are the imposing electrically-operated gates an impossible barrier. The problem arises once you drive inside. I become so confused by the many driveways that I arrive at the back entrance feeling like a tradesman at Downton Abbey.

Moynihan, chairman of the British Olympic Association (BOA), emerges. “You have managed to arrive at the part of the house that is 160 years old, built for the governor of the Bank of England. Not many people manage that,” he says, reassuringly. And then he provides another piece of history that casts a different light on Britain’s class stereotypes.

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The Evening Standard

Exclusive: Ahead of title D‑Day, striking great reveals his admiration for City boss and why he could not talk to Ferguson after that 6-1 derby humbling

You won’t hear Denis Law belittling Roberto Mancini if Manchester City’s dreams of a first title since 1968 are shattered this season. Some supporters may not be so kind to the Italian, given that he has spent £210million on players in two years and that failure for City would mean United celebrating their 20th championship.

The Premier League’s top two meet at the Etihad on Monday night, a match Sir Alex Ferguson has described as the biggest derby of his 26-year Old Trafford career with City just three points adrift of their rivals and with three games remaining.

Law, of course, has a foot in both camps, given that his glorious United career was book-ended with two seasons at City: 1960-61 and 1973-74.

The 72-year-old has lived longer in Manchester than in his home town of Aberdeen and when I ask him where his heart will be on Monday, he says: “With Aberdeen. I want both Manchester teams to do well. Football now is a global game and it’s really good for the city of Manchester to be shown throughout the world: two fantastic stadiums, two very good football teams.

“We’re back to the sixties when it was City and United. For the next few years, they will be the two teams that the rest of the country will have to beat if they want to win titles. Chelsea, Arsenal, Liverpool and Spurs, possibly, will have to be really good to beat the two Manchester teams.”

And while he will not favour either Manchester club, Law does reveal his admiration for Mancini.

Level-headed: Denis Law has been 'really impressed' with Roberto Mancini, image courtesy of the Evening Standard

Sitting in an Old Trafford suite, not far from where there is a statue honouring the ‘King of the Stretford End’, he tells me: “I met the guy a few times. He’s very good, very nice. I was really impressed with his interview after they won the game here 6-1. It was some result. They don’t get that very often. They could have won by more.

“He just behaved impeccably. He was so calm, didn’t go over the top. He just accepted that they had won the game. I’ve watched a lot of City and they have two or three players who really look good: David Silva, Sergio Aguero.”

Law did not speak to Ferguson after City claimed the biggest win at Old Trafford in 56 years and opened up a five-point lead over their rivals.

“You’d have to be extremely brave to talk to him after that defeat,” says Law, but he did not need to be told that Ferguson would bounce back.

“Everybody’s going, ‘Oh, that’s the end of Fergie.’ No, no, no, I never thought that. If he gets a bad result, he’ll just battle on. This team have not played well this season. But when you don’t play well and get a result, that’s when you win titles. Sir Alex is special, he’s just been phenomenal. There hasn’t been a manager like him.”

Then, realising this puts Ferguson even ahead of his own manager, Sir Matt Busby, he quickly adds: “Busby probably was the nearest to Alex. Busby did the same as Alex has been doing, building teams. When one team goes, another team comes in. Busby built a team in ’48 which I didn’t see. He built the ’58 team and, of course, lost half of them in the Munich disaster and he built the ’68 team.”

Law then pinpoints the difference between Busby and Ferguson.

He says: “When United lost a bit of their status in the seventies, Sir Matt didn’t have the squad of players. That doesn’t happen with Alex. He’s got a squad and some young players are always coming through.”

This season the United revival, after the 6-1 rout, has not been through the kids but the return of Paul Scholes. The 37-year-old midfielder ended his playing days last May but Ferguson persuaded him to reverse that decision in January to help the club out of an injury crisis.

Scholes has since scored three times and given the team a new impetus. Law says: “Scholes should never have retired. I thought he’d another season in front of him. He’s still, even now, one of the best players.”

When I ask who is the best player of all time, he cannot decide between Alfredo di Stefano and Ferenc Puskas, both legends of the Real Madrid team that ruled Europe in the late fifties and early sixties.

He then adds: “Without a doubt Lionel Messi could be the best player ever. He’s only 24 and has broken the goalscoring record already for Barcelona. The beauty about Messi is he gets on with the game.

“Some of the players just dive and roll about in agony. I didn’t dive because I didn’t want to show the opposition that I was hurt. But, in my days, every team was the same.”

Law’s 237 goals make him United’s second-highest scorer after Sir Bobby Charlton (249) but he expects Wayne Rooney to overtake them both given that the striker’s double against Everton on Sunday took him to 180.

Despite Rooney’s exploits, Law picks Jimmy Greaves as his favourite English player of all time.

“Jimmy Greaves was not the greatest player but certainly the greatest goal scorer I’ve seen,” he says.

“You can see players get in the box and you think they’re not going to score. When we played against Tottenham and Jimmy Greaves had a ball inside that box, then it was in the back of the net.”

Aside from football, Law’s other focus at the moment is on helping promote two night-time walking marathons in aid of Cancer Research UK.

It is a cause close to Law’s heart as he  was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2003 but, luckily, it was caught in time and he has not had a recurrence.

“When you hear those dreaded words, ‘You’ve got cancer,’ you think it’s the end of the world and that your life is no good any more,” he says.  “But it’s not like that at all because there’s hope.”

Denis is supporting Cancer Research UK’s night-time walking marathons, Shine 2012 in Manchester on September 8 and London on September 29. The aim is to recruit 15,000 people and raise £3.5m. For details visit shinewalk.org

The Independent

With increasing lack of trust in politicians and church leaders, sports stars have filled the vacuum.

Formula One’s presence in Bahrain this weekend was the result of the sport forgetting a very important principle: that sport is more than just athletic activity or, in this case, buzzing round a circuit in hi-tech cars. Above everything else, it has a moral dimension.

By choosing to race in a kingdom whose suppression of human rights has been so widely broadcast to the world, the petrol-heads are not only damaging their own sport but also the credibility of the wider sports movement.

Cynics will say this is humbug. Formula One is probably the most unabashed money-making machine in all of sport. It is also a most curious sport. Given the technology needed, many would even question whether it counts as a true sport. And, unlike other sports, the real controller is not the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile but the rights holder, Bernie Ecclestone.

And while publicly Ecclestone is careful to say little about wider issues, he doesn’t appear privately to be driven by morality. Last year, as controversy raged around the Bahrain Grand Prix, he told Zayed Alzayani, the businessman who runs the competition, that “if human rights was the criterion for F1 races, we would only have them in Belgium and Switzerland”.

But this is where Ecclestone is contradictory. Formula One’s rise has been made possible because, with increasing lack of trust in politicians, men of science and letters, and even church leaders, sports stars have filled the vacuum. Sport has also become a rare source of trusted news in an intensely sceptical world; a sporting result is a fact about which there can be no argument. And sport can also be understood by all, regardless of language or culture or intellect.

Ecclestone has made the most of this. In taking the sport to places with little interest in Formula One, he has claimed that, by staging the race, the country reaches a higher level. Bahrain’s Crown Prince Sheikh Salman bin Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa buys that argument, lavishing millions to stage it.

Given all this, Ecclestone cannot escape the charge that he now appears to be colluding with the Bahrain government in its suppression of human rights.

That this should be done by a sport which has blossomed in this country in the very year London becomes the first city to stage a third Olympics is all the more regrettable.

It is worth recalling that modern sport as it was spread round the world from this country had morality at its core. Back in the middle of the 19th century, Thomas Hughes presented his headmaster at Rugby, Thomas Arnold, a man of religion, as a great man of sport. Hughes’s book Tom Brown’s Schooldays was so persuasive that Pierre de Coubertin took up the idea to revive the Olympics. In effect, what Hughes and De Coubertin did was to spawn two ideas which have become global concepts. Hughes’s big idea was in the private realm – that sport develops character. De Coubertin’s was in the public realm – that sport could transmit values between nations through international competition.

Contrast this with another race that was held this weekend in London, the Marathon. The origins of that race are purely nationalistic if not racial, a Greek runner advertising his country’s unexpected military victory against the invading Persians. The ancient Greeks may have invented the Olympics but they never saw them in moral terms. For them, the Olympics were not an expression of universal human values. They were open only to free Greek men. After a time, slaves and “barbarians” were allowed to watch but not take part.

In contrast, observe what De Coubertin said about sport. At that time, there was much debate about whether athletes should be paid. De Coubertin did not care for that, declaring: “To me, sport was a religion with its church, dogmas, service … above all a religious feeling, and it seemed to me as childish to make all this depend on whether an athlete received a five-franc coin as automatically to consider the parish clergy unbelievers, because they receive a salary for looking after the church.”

True, De Coubertin himself collaborated with the Nazis. Sport also struggled to deal with apartheid. But it can sometimes show the way in however limited a fashion.

Back in the Twenties the British sent an all-white delegation to India, headed by the liberal Sir John Simon, and including Clement Atlee, to judge whether the nation was capable of ruling itself. Gandhi was so outraged he came out of retirement to resume leadership of his nation’s freedom fight. At the same time, the MCC sent a cricket team which played against Indians and encouraged them to form a cricket board which paved the way to India becoming this great cricketing nation. This showed how sport can see the bigger picture. Formula One appears to have lost sight of that.

Evening Standard

Last Saturday night, as Charlton celebrated promotion to the Championship, Michael Slater sent a text to Chris Powell saying: “I think it is a time for a vote of confidence”. As the chairman recounts this story he laughs and says: “Chris got the joke.”

Just in case there is any doubt about the future of the manager the 46-year-old financier adds: “We’ve been in the doldrums with three years in League One but the momentum has started.”

It is 15 months since Powell was handed his first managerial role but after a mixed time last season, which ended with the club in 13th, Charlton have been almost unstoppable this time round. They have held top spot since the middle of September and their victory at Carlisle saw them become the first team in England to win promotion this term.

Powell might speak of recreating the Alan Curbishley era at The Valley but Slater proudly proclaims: “We are in the Powell era. We’re starting our own bit of history now.”

The transformation came after an overhaul of the squad in the summer when 17 players were signed, 11 were sold and a further six released. Slater is sure the squad can do themselves justice in the Championship but accepts some investment is needed.

Joy: Dany N'Guessan (second left) celebrates with team-mates after scoring during Charlton's promotion season. Image courtesy of the Evening Standard

That may come in the forward line to support Bradley Wright-Phillips, Powell’s first signing last year, who has scored 22 goals this season.

Slater will not reveal transfer budgets and although promotion means an extra £4million to £5m in television revenue, he says: “I don’t think that we have to spend more money just to survive in the Championship. This season we wanted Chris to put together a squad that would be not just a top squad for League One but able to hold their own in the Championship. Our squad right now would be competitive with probably half the Championship.

“Does that mean we’d finish mid-table? I don’t know.

“But there’s a lot of teams struggling in the Championship and without investment, which doesn’t look as if it’s going to be coming for many of them, I think we can be competitive.”

His long-term goal is the Premier League, where he already has a model to follow. He adds: “West Bromwich Albion seem to be operating very sensibly. They had a few years of yo-yoing between the Premier League and the Championship but now seem to have established themselves. They’re even posting profits.”

The top flight would mean matches against his beloved Manchester City where he is a season-ticket holder. Slater will be at the Etihad for the Manchester derby a week on Monday but has given up hopes of his club capturing their first title since 1968.

“Even if they beat United they’re still two points behind,” he says. “We needed to go into that fixture already three points clear because they know what it takes to win titles and City have bottled it.”

Charlton, however, have the title in their sights. Victory over Wycombe Wanderers at The Valley tomorrow will see them take the honour, providing Sheffield United slip up at MK Dons.

On Sunday, Slater runs in the London Marathon for the second time hoping to raise £25,000 for the Demelza Hospice Care for Children, a charity that Charlton support.

“Should we be crowned champions tomorrow it would be the start of a memorable weekend for me,” he says.

To sponsor Michael, go to justgiving.com/michael-slater2012

History Today

On February 8th this year two events took place in London. In a crown court Harry Redknapp, manager of Tottenham Hotspur, a football club which has not won England’s league title for 51 years, was cleared of tax evasion charges. A few hours later Fabio Capello, England’s Italian football manager, resigned. The speculation was that Redknapp would succeed Capello. Interesting as these events were they were not earth shattering; indeed they paled in comparison with news from around the world. The regime of Syria’s President Assad was bombarding the city of Homs, aided by Russia’s and China’s veto of UN action, while in the US the 2012 Republican race to find a challenger to Barack Obama had taken another turn. Yet that night football led the BBC’s News at Ten. Even The Times, which described the Syrian impasse as the ‘most serious East-West confrontation since the end the Cold War’, devoted its whole front page to football matters; Syria did not even rate a mention. So how did sport become so important?

Sport, often of a brutal kind, was popular with the ancient Romans. But the Roman Empire had little or no influence in China or India. Today these two countries, whose combined population numbers over three billion, enjoy a ringside seat for most sports thanks to modern global media.

A century ago there was neither the media nor much political interest in sport. When nearly £20,000 was needed to send a British Olympic team to the 1920 Antwerp Olympics, Winston Churchill, secretary of state for war, refused to release government money. He urged businessmen to help. Today, despite the worst recession since the 1930s, David Cameron has few problems justifying the spending of £9.3 billion of public money on the 2012 Olympics.

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