Dreamers should wake and get real

When they come to write the sporting and cultural history of this place many years down the line, these last 10 days may be regarded as the point at which we reached the endgame. Adversity throws the strangest people and groupings together and so it has been here as the unlikely bedfellows of motorcycle road racing and football both stare disaster square in the face.

The diagnosis for both is critical and can be traced to the same familiar cause - a chronic lack of both foresight and investment.

Of the two, local football's malaise has been in sharper focus over the past week. Its biggest problem has always been an over-inflated view of its own status and importance and that pomposity has now been cruelly exposed.

Can it only be a few weeks since optimistic noises were being made about the Irish Football Association becoming part of a joint bid by the Celtic nations to host a future finals of the European Championships? The proposal was that Scotland and Wales would provide the stadiums for most of the games, but that Northern Ireland would host at least one of the qualifying groups.

In theory, this sounded like a tremendous idea in that it offered the opportunity to experience top-class international football at firsthand, rather than the dross of the Irish League to which a few souls are exposed every Saturday.

But international football tournaments have little to do with theory and everything to do with hard-nosed practicalities. A host association would need at least three stadiums, each with seating-capacity for 30,000 people. Northern Ireland doesn't even have one.

This minor detail was skirted over in the wide-eyed rush towards the prospect of some decent international football and it might have stayed that way had UEFA not come to call last Wednesday night. Yugoslavia were in Belfast for a friendly and Ernie Walker, the influential chairman of UEFA's Safety Committee, took the opportunity to look around Windsor Park.

To say that he was not impressed by what he saw is something of an understatement. Usually in these situations, a report is compiled, filed and circulated within the small close-knit UEFA community. But, on this occasion, Walker was so exercised by the state of Northern Ireland's home international venue that he went public.

His verdict was damning. By his estimation large parts of the ground need to be completely rebuilt and, when pushed on the issue, he suggested that Northern Ireland and the IFA need to forget about Windsor Park in its present state and start again from scratch.

At full capacity Windsor Park seats only 12,000 people and as such is regarded as wholly inadequate for international football. Walker, of course, could not have known about the intimidating, sectarian atmosphere that is so much part of the fabric of the place.

But, by effectively condemning the venue in terms of its suitability for the future, he could have inadvertently been doing the football public here a huge favour. To his credit, IFA president, Jim Boyce made little effort to paper over the cracks. In his public comments he has met the embarrassment of the Windsor Park set-up head on and has attempted to use it as a lever to secure support for a new start.

The conundrum is where to turn to next. Government is the obvious benefactor, but with the new political structures barely bedded down yet, and the competing demands of underfunded healthcare and education systems, it is unlikely that the purse strings are going to be loosened for a new sports stadium.

The irony is that, had investment been provided on a much more modest but regular basis over the past 30 or 40 years, then we would not have reached the present disastrous situation.

THOSE charged with control of motorcycle road racing in Ireland are probably beginning to realise that as well. For decades the sport has survived in splendid isolation from the sporting mainstream with its own dedicated band of aficionados and competitors.

It was an uncomplicated relationship and there seemed little prospect of any change. The spiralling death-toll, however, over the last two years has engendered a shift in the public mood.

Joey Dunlop's death was obviously the most high-profile and the deaths of Gary Dynes and Andrew McLean at the Monaghan Road Races have only hardened attitudes. For a while it appeared that the sport might be able to tough it out, but it seems only a matter of time before the voices against it become impossible to ignore.

Only last Thursday Jeremy McWilliams, currently the best local short-circuit rider, called for a total ban on road racing. The whisper is becoming a scream.

The clamour now is for the construction of a purpose-built circuit somewhere in the North so that riders can race in an environment with runoff areas and other safety features that are simply not available on the narrow country roads.

All of this points to the common-sense value of transferring the sport to these circuits. The difficulty is that there is not one currently available here to a sufficiently high standard for both riders and spectators.

Building one would cost a significant amount of money and the familiar demand has been for government to get involved. The predictable response, for all of the reasons already familiar to the football authorities, has been silence. Without some alternative, the sport could be extinct within five years.

The newest buzzwords in the modern sporting lexicon are public-private partnerships. They are business arrangements which have been successful in both England and the US, but in both of those instances they were fuelled by a high degree of interest from the general public. The local situation here is less clear-cut.

Northern Ireland couldn't sell-out Windsor Park for the recent visit of France and last Wednesday the gate for the game against Yugoslavia was approximately 6,000 - hardly figures likely to have number-crunchers in big corporations rubbing their hands with glee.

But, amidst all the pessimism, there is at least the attraction of a fresh start and all the possibilities that offers. If that is going to happen, a few mindsets have to be changed as well.

For better or worse the days of handouts and expensive state-funded stadium ventures are a thing of the past. In the future, a little leadership and direction might be the most valuable assets of all.