“Ah, isn’t that nice, the wife of the Cambridge president is kissing the cox of the Oxford crew.”
Harry Carpenter (BBC TV Boat Race 1977)
Recently, I saw an article in the local paper proclaiming a new “£1.1m Midland Road Sports Complex”. Great news you might think for a city whose sporting provision is dismal; I know from first-hand experience after trying most sports. So, what’s not to like?
Consider where the bulk of sports facilities spending in Bradford has gone in the last twenty years. From an eye-watering £1.3m project to revive the Manningham Mills sports complex in 2006 to numerous other schemes with one thing in common; they are all postcode driven.
Take a look at the state of these facilities now and also consider the bang for your buck?
Box Ticking
Driving most of these schemes is money from a central pot. It may be Sport England – (old catchphrase Sport for All so long as you live where we can tick enough boxes) – or a National Governing Body (NGB) as is the case with the Midland Road scheme.
Funding for the project has come from the Football Foundation, the Premier League, the FA and government’s charity that helps communities improve their local football facilities through football grants; the Power to Change charitable trust, Sport England and Bradford Council.
All the King’s horses then.
Colour Blind
Cricket is even worse as it pursues its South Asian strategy in the belief that the grassroots game will be saved by focusing on a single demographic. Not content with previous significant spends at the Karmand Centre (undisclosed) and Myra Shay (£2.5m) the great and the good know no bounds.
A combination of the English Cricket Board (ECB), Sport England and our hopeless Council have committed to a £6m plus spend at the dilapidated Bradford Park Avenue cricket ground. Almost £1m has been spent to date with your cash-strapped council’s part £330k.
The ECB has also funded five free to play artificial cricket wickets at Myra Shay, Woodhall Recreation Ground, Haworth Road, Hudson Avenue and Park Avenue at a cost estimated at £50k – tick! Find them if you can but pitifully there is little evidence of usage.
Sport For All
The fundamental attraction of sport is that it should be available to all, irrespective of colour, religion and physical ability. However, what these hopeless do-gooders achieve by throwing cash at such narrow criteria is not create a need or a desire but a sense of entitlement.
Kids in these areas may indeed need something to do – as do many others across the city – but why the skew of focus? Recently, I read of youths running amok on a local estate, making the lives of residents an utter misery. Who is to say whether new sporting facilities would make any difference but the fact is, there has been no such investment in this area in all the years I’ve lived here.
The Exam Factories
There is a much greater issue to consider though and that is simply that kids do not play enough sport at school these days – if any at all – to actually develop any long-term interests. School sports teams are a thing of the past and privately run clubs have become, in effect, creches and quasi youth clubs. Junior sections have also become cash cows for cash strapped clubs.
It gradually dawned on me that I was child minding the vast majority on the cheap; there was no passion for sport evident to me. The Council also published a sporting strategy document in 2019; it was a hopeless document written by the ill-advised for the ill-informed.
With the Council broke and clueless to boot, what and where we as a city get new sporting facilities will forever be determined by those many miles away ticking self-soothing boxes and dreaming of the Queen’s Honours List for services to pissing money down the drain.
Footnote
I wrote to the local MP and all three councillors to offer an explanation as to why big-ticket sports funding is so lacking in BD10. Only one councillor has had the grace to reply.
An abridged version of this piece was also published in the local paper and inevitably drew the usual tripe comments about race. This is not about race, especially from one who has spent decades coaching kids of every background imaginable; it is about opportunity.
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