Pathetic support for female sport

"Pathetic" I thought. Last Saturday morning, Mary Hannigan reported in the Sports supplement of this newspaper on the preparations of the Irish women's cricket team for the World Cup in India. The full cost of the journey to India for the squad is £35,000. Players are to pay £650 each of the £2,000 per person cost. An application was made earlier this year to the Department of Education's Sports Section (now in Tourism, Sport and Recreation) for a £15,000 grant towards participation in the World Cup. A grant of £4,000 was made. The captain got a total of £50 in backing from 65 companies. Pathetic.

Surely the strategically managed new public service does not react with an allocation 73 per cent less than that requested simply as a matter of course.

The idea that any Irish team taking part in a World Cup event in any sport can unashamedly be allocated the next-to-nothing amount of £4,000 from the sports granting section arm of Government and that £50 would make even a right-wing, anti-statist, non-interventionist cringe in embarrassment. Better not to pretend that sports are supported at all. Where is the National Lottery? What of all those "healthy pursuits", the "ambassadors of the country" and the "role models for our children"?

The story brought to mind a similar tale of woe told to me in relation to women's soccer in Ireland. As I heard it, it was bad enough being soccer and not Gaelic or rugby, but women's soccer meant that commercial sponsorship was more a corporate work of mercy than a brilliant business deal, and grants and National Lottery funds were drip fed, if at all.

A lot of advertising aimed at 25-44 year olds is now targeted at women. There are ads aimed at women for pensions, cars, insurance, bank loans and mortgages alongside the traditional washing powder nonsense. Marketing to women is here to stay. It should only be a short step to increase business sponsorship of women's team sports.

Of course, there is already plenty of sponsorship of our major women sports personalities, the so-called elite athletes, and no harm. The real change will come when women's team sports are fully backed by business and Government.

There might be a long time to wait. We think of the United States as being advanced along this sort of road. But comments by US women sports journalists offered on ESPN's SportsZone Web site give pause for thought. They were asked when they realised that women's sports had come of age. ESPN had already registered the naming of a Nike trainer shoe after basketball player Sheryl Swoopes in 1996 as a major event for women's sports. Nearly all the events the journalists wrote about had happened in the last three or four years only and this was the US. Mariah Burton Nelson, author of Are We Winning It? commented, "For me, it was four years ago when I saw a boy wearing a women's jersey for the first time a Sheryl Swoopes jersey". Can you imagine it a boy wearing a winning camogie team's jersey, just as the girls deck themselves out in Man United colours?

One journalist wrote about the first time she saw scalpers hawk tickets for a women's basketball game. Will we ever see that day outside Croke Park for a camogie match? Or even for a women's cricket World Cup game?

Women's team sports are happening all over this country. They don't need to appear on TV or to get commercial backing or Government assistance to be made real. But for that reason, a savvy marketing manager might want to remember them. Is £50 the only smart money around? And as for the Government, well, is it too late to rescue its honour as regards a modest but meaningful grant for women's cricket in the World Cup? It's the only World Cup we have going at the moment.

Oliver O'Connor, a former diplomat, is an investment funds specialist