Hold the Back Page

With NIALL KIELY

Memo to Cuche: get note for the record Racing facing three real dangers

THOSE DOGGED folk who’ve slogged their way through Donald Rumsfeld’s self-serving memoir Known and Unknown will remember the central role ascribed to The Memo, as his book writhes its undignified and self-serving course, blaming virtually everything on others.

Working in the Middle East for the UN in the late 1980s, I discovered the power of the memo, clothed in a classic UN-style TLA, the Note For the Record. Used cleverly, it could cover your buttocks, nail someone else’s posterior to the record and/or be used to claim posthumous misgivings after the solids met the regional whirring blades.

It’s a lesson yet to be learned by Didier Cuche, the veteran Swiss skier, who bested two Austrians to win the World Cup Super-G in Kvitfjell, Norway, last Sunday.

He’s the defending champion, of course, but the 36-year-old’s win was particularly commendable because it came a day after the International Ski Federation’s (FIS) decision to fine him 5,000 Swiss francs (€3,900) – and issue him with a written warning – for unsportsmanlike behaviour after he allegedly threatened a referee.

The facts are not in dispute. On the Thursday, Cuche, a member of the FIS athletes commission and thus entitled to express the safety concerns of his fellow skiers, phoned race director Gunter Hujara to voice the fears of a number of competitors about one potentially dangerous jump at the top of the course. Oh, and he added that if there was an accident, he’d make clear that he’d warned the director before the race.

Hujara claimed Cuche was attacking and threatening him. The official just “flipped”, Cuche claimed, and the skier then resigned from the commission on the basis that there was little point in representing his fellow competitors if the FIS was going to ignore their real concerns.

Here’s two pieces of free skills’ training, Didier.

First: those who can, do; those can’t, teach, and those who can’t do either, administer. Treat apparatchiks accordingly.

Second: learn the NFR lesson. Detail your evidence-based concerns, taking care that your matter-of-fact tone is one of regretful concern for the sport in general, and its athletes in particular. And stitch it on the record. In writing.

Collective blazerati need to listen to secure rugby’s future

FIVE THINGS we know from this Six Nations.

The England team is a long way off the finished article.

Scrum and offside rules are not being enforced.

Reffing standards are poor to piss-poor.

Paddy Wallace’s is an Orange card selection.

And the game needs to listen to constructive criticism.

Thoughts for today. Difficult as it may be to associate the word with his glowering image, Martin Johnson is an ingénue. In both tactical and management terms, he remains a neophyte. In selecting him to run the England World Cup challenge, the Twickers blazers took every bit as big a risk as France did with Marc Lievremont (and the latter’s mishandling of better raw material).

Scotland have little nowadays other than stickability and pride, yet lost to England in a game that included a forward-pass seven-pointer and an unpunished forearm smash by Matt Banahan that laid out Kelly Brown.

If the England pack is taken on and matched, the backs give every impression of ordinariness. And, even with quick ball for the scrumhalf, those three-quarters can get flustered in traffic.

The scrummaging issue is becoming ridiculous because IRB “hooooold . . . engage” strictures are silly, and because referees are not consistently enforcing the long-standing requirement that props must drive straight.

A far bigger problem, on pitches made smaller by high fitness levels, is that most teams are slyly pushing past the back-foot offside line, plus they’re often getting away with illegal encroachment in wide midfield and down the outside channels.

In December we were told reffing was to become a meritocracy and not just a matter of rotation, and an end to geographical or national numbers balancing acts.

We didn’t need last weekend’s comedy turn by Peter Allan on the touchline to remind us he’s at the piss-poor end of the officiating spectrum: just look at any of his dire performances down the years, even at Magner’s level, for hard evidence.

Why is Paddy Wallace in Ireland’s match 22? Rory Best’s being pushed by Seán Cronin, and might well lose out if Jerry Flannery re-emerges from his injury sequence. That’d leave Ulster on the brink of a blank: the IRFU cannot countenance that; for all sorts of reasons, historical and practical.

Finally . . . What’s the Japanese earthquake to do with the health of rugby? Quite a lot, actually. Hiscox, Swiss Re, Catlin, Omega and Amlin have all taken big hits from the Chile and New Zealand quakes, as well as climatic excesses in Australia.

At a time when other sports are chasing rugby union’s money and supporters, it would do the game a power of good if the collective blazerati could find the willingness to listen to the clamour from within the game and secure its future as an appealing and safe spectacle.

History’s not encouraging. For one small instance, remember how the English RFU mishandled the outspoken Brendan Venter before he went back to Seth Efrica? I was reminded of his coruscating honesty recently when re-reading his parting quote: “There is one thing I can say, fellas, and that is that I was never misquoted.”

Carew’s acute accent leads to grave error

MY NOMADIC presence in this slot being fitful and fleeting, I’ve had no opportunity until now to tell you about a neat shorthand used by some group-practice GPs in England.

It allows them to note pithily intelligence about patients whose files may end up in front of a peripatetic locum, and mostly consists of TLAs (three-letter acronyms).

They work well as in-house code, rather like Masonic handshakes, and with an added frisson: risk of their secret being rumbled by some health service spoilsport.

They include TLAs like, for instance, PFO (pissed, fell over). There are also regional classics, like NFN (normal for Norfolk).

My own personal favourite is the DBI, or dirt-bag index, a cunning measure of socio-economic status that is evidence-based and has metrics of sorts to prove it. It takes the estimated number of days the patient has gone unwashed, times the number of missing teeth, and multiplies that by the number of tattoos.

It occurs that this is now unlikely to work with pro footballers in England, given their fondness for cosmetic dentistry and buffed appearance – and, of course, their burgeoning mania for tattoos would distort the metrics.

Consider, then, the plight of one John Carew, Norwegian international and sometime English Premier League striker, who decided to have the motto “Ma Vie, Mes Règies” permanently inked on the side of his neck.

It might, in translation (My Life, My Rules) be the perfect catch-all mantra for the very model of a modern major professional, typified by generally enveloping self-regard and an unwonted welcome for himself.

Carew doubtless also referenced the semiotic resonance and cunning connection to that Mob-luvvie and Bratpack crooner Frank Sinatra and his endlessly reprised apologia pro vita sua, My Way.

One can but pity the present plight of poor Carew. Something went awry twixt mind and lip, or got lost in translation as the exhortation went to print, as it were.

And so the presumably now mad Carew ended up with an acute rather than a grave accent on “Regies”, and on his neck the mantra: “My Life, My Menstrual Cycle”.

The Final Straw

THE SPECTACULAR that is Cheltenham week occludes briefly three real dangers facing racing the industry: funding, betting and doping. And it's not clear how racing will sustain radical deracination.

From the bottom up. The clumsiness of racing's response to Nicky Henderson's (left) late withdrawal of Champion Hurdle favourite Binocular – when it became evident that a skin-allergy steroid had not cleared the animal's system in time – was evident on Tuesday when six of the trainer's placed runners were clearly targeted for drugs testing.

Henderson, who invited the authorities to test Binocular, is damned if he does, it seems, and damned if he doesn't.

Horse-racing is wrestling unconvincingly with replacing the bookmaker's moiety and the Tote levy with another model that will take account of the vast amount of betting that has migrated offshore.

The shirtfronts of Marseille and Lyon, the French teams eliminated this week from the Champions League, were sponsored by BetClic and BWin. Two more straws in the wind.

And it's not just Irish bookie shops that're in trouble. In the UK the pernicious slot-machine FOBTs – the "crack cocaine" of gambling addiction – are no longer pumping revenue, and the cost squeeze is on to the extent that the well-appointed high-street outlet may soon disappear.

Speaking same language

AT ANFIELD nowadays they've little else to cling to apart from club folklore and endlessly recycled stories of the bootroom and the distant good old days, but one splendid anecdote surfaced in obituaries for former player Avi Cohen (left), the first Israeli to play top-division soccer in England.


When the then linguistically challenged but clever Cohen found himself changing beside Kenny Dalglish in 1979, he kept saying: "You and me - the same!"

Dalglish the Glaswegian, who at that time would've benefited from subtitles, inquired why. And Cohen replied: "You and me – the same. We both (need to) learn English!"