Dan Travis

The Myth of Motivation - A Review of "Smile or Die" - How Positive Thinking Fooled America and the World.

Aiming to duplicate the habits of top tennis players takes more than physical training alone. It also means becoming familiar with the ‘success modelling’ process of the recently emerging field of sports psychology, and reading several texts that Barbara Ehrenreich highlights for particular criticism. Sport, tennis in particular, has spawned some timeless classics (at least within the tennis playing world) that predate many self help books, from the early 70s Buddhist approach to tennis, Timothy Gallwey’s The Inner Game of Tennis through to the Machiavellian classic Win Ugly by Brad Gilbert.

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'Culture of British Sport' lecture to the University of Arkansas

Thanks to A.H.A international and Susie Thomas for hosting 'Culture of British Sport' lecture in Holburn. Although this is one of my favourite lectures of the year, it can also prove the most challenging. Questions from the American Audience where interesting. They included: "what is cricket?" "Why is everyone running in the UK?" What is Polo?" Looked at the role of international rivalry in UK sport. The ambiguity towards competition and the desire to win. Why the NFL was unable to establish itself in Europe. Uk and the Olympics. Looking forward to new series of lectures at the end of the month including "How do you recreate a sporting elite?" Looking forward to Tennis Tigers Tournament at Brighton College this Sunday.

Blog posted here.

Barcelona - Sanchez Casal Tennis Academy "Mental Toughness" Day Three

The last three days was pulled together by Lorenzo Beltrame with the 'importance of rituals' session that started on court this morning. Looking at the 'between points' situation that makes up for around 90 per cent of a match, Lorenzo and colleague at the Human Peformance institute Jessica. The development of rituals between points is seen as a process that has for components. The intergartion of the routine into the match is taken very seriously by the HPI and is seen as crucial in developing the Ideal Performance State. The between points ritual has to be rehersed regularly if it is to become habitual.
We spent the rest of the morning revisiting the course as a whole and looking at the most effective ways of introducing the programme to our players.
The importance of writing in the whole IPS process is one that was stressed repeatedly. The thought that is written by hand rather than typed or spoken, is said to be far more powerful in both changing the thought process and for memory. Will be very interesting to hear Rob Clowes take on the primacy of the written word. It is certainly the first time I've heard it introduced in sports coaching. Looking forward to seeing some results by trying this out over the next year.

Barcelona - Sanchez Casal Tennis Academy "Mental Toughness" Day Two

The second day with the coaching elite of Spain saw Dr Loehr and his assistant J establish the need to identify the main barriers that your students have in reaching IPS (Ideal Persformance State). It was discussed at length what the IPS might be and consist in. In summary, IPS sees the individual able to establish the ammount of energy they have at their disposal prior to engaging in competition or training. This is done largely assessing the quantitive and qualitive nature of nutrition, sleep, hydration and exercise the individual has partaken in. This having been established the building blocks of an IPS are in place.
The coach initiates and the student follows, a candid assessment of physical, emotional, mental and spiritual energy. The assessment consists in examining the energy managment habits of the individual in an attempt to identify the blocks on energy flow that are occuring.
It was Dr Loehr´s assertion that the block on energy flow is a barrier that is accomopanied by a voice, the result of a rationalisation that contributes to the perpetuation of the barrier. Compounding this problem is the formation of habits. Dr Loehr emphasised that if the barriers to energy flow are not dealt with then they will become habitualised.

The most powerful way to intervene in the unblocking of energy and bringing down the barriers is changing the destructive 'voice' that speaks to us when we are competing and training.  To do this one first has to recognise it.  The voice can take many forms but is most likely to be parental, particularly if the host is a child or teenager.  Around the voice a story has been constructed that needs to be changed from old to new.  Constructing a new story by hand writing/journal writing is claimed by Dr Loehr to be by far the best way to change the story and in fact to confront any of the blocks on energy flow.  The first phase of rescripting in this way was said to take up to 17 days, at least to begin the process. 

Tomorrow am looking forward to the conclusion of the Instututes work.  There have been some intrestiing concepts raised by Dr Loehr's research.  I will highlight a few tomorrow and look forward to putting theory into practice.  Just to warn you in advance you'll like the process of 'mylinisation'. 

Barcelona - Sanchez Casal Tennis Academy "Mental Toughness" Day One

Dr Jim Loehr introduced the concept of IPS (Ideal Peformance State) to an international group of coaches and players. Dr Loehr claims his system will help augment an already dominant Spanish position in world tennis.
Drawn from his life's work observing and working to improve the performance of both top flight sportsmen and those aspiring to be so, Dr Loehr introduces his concept of 'Energy Management'. Managing energy is fundamental to our achieving what we ourselves set out to achieve. I hesistate to use the term 'Success' as this is somewhat contentious as it is referred to by Dr Loehr as as an 'external' motivation and can be misused with negative consequences.

Marathons: running away from The Race

This Article originally appeared on spiked-online Arpril 30th 2010

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 Judging by the flailing, portly people taking part in Brighton’s Marathon, running is no longer about the thrill of competition.

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The recent ‘Marathon By the Sea’ held in Brighton on the UK’s south-east coast was certainly a success from the point of view of participation: 8,000 people took part. But while such mass involvement seems like a good thing, there are also some serious downsides to our changing attitude to running.

The number of people in the UK putting themselves through what is a significant test of stamina has been growing steadily in recent years. According to Sport England, between 2008 and 2009 ‘participation in athletics (including running and jogging) increased by more than 215,000 to 1.827 million’. In the last year alone, Britain staged 55 marathons with around a total of 80,000 participants. Little wonder that it seems that every other person I know is either ‘running a 10k’ or preparing to run a marathon.

The current popularity of distance-running is in stark contrast to my own experience of running while at school during the 1980s. The obligatory cross-country ‘race’ around the school playing fields during the winter was an activity that was dreaded and despised, particularly by the girls. In fact, cross country seemed to us to have been invented as a form of torture. We, the unwilling participants, saw the whole exercise as unpleasant and pointless. While the 1980s might have been a golden era for British running, with Sebastian Coe, Steve Ovett and Steve Cram all breaking world records, their feats did not inspire the majority of secondary school children.

It seems strange to see some of the very same individuals who were once openly hostile to cross country now enthusiastically running round the park in preparation for an endurance event as extreme as the marathon. What is it about these extreme endurance events that is attracting so many people?

Part of the explanation is that the entry point to running is very low. If you can put one foot in front of the other for any length of time then you can run. There are no equipment costs, apart from a half-decent pair of running shoes, and there is little need to pay for coaching as the skill level is minimal.

Some of my more mean-spirited sporting colleagues point out that running is the only option open to you if you lack the skills necessary for any other sport. Looking at the field in the Brighton marathon it was clear that 30 years ago hardly any of the participants would ever have dreamed of calling themselves runners. The majority had very poor technique and many looked as though they were heading for injury before they completed the 26 miles. Pre-1980, no one would have called themselves a serious runner if they were over 13 stone in weight. Now, style or body type is no barrier to entering the running craze. This may fit well with todays ‘everyone can participate’ culture, but it leads to a very curious spectacle.

A Guardian writer attempted to explain running’s popularity in pragmatic terms: ‘Due to cost and time pressures, the figures indicate that people are abandoning the gym and organised team sport in favour of more flexible and informal pursuits such as running and cycling.’ This may be true, but the appeal of running as opposed to other sports amounts to more than it simply being cost effective. Running also allows for a continual sense of self improvement: there is always a time to beat, another marathon to train for. Or, instead of trying to better your times, you can simply increase the number of marathons you run, an option taken to the extreme by the once portly and now sporty comedian Eddie Izzard with his 43 marathons in 51 days.

What this means for the distance runner today is that the focus on beating your own time has taken the place of beating other people. For the modern runner, the removal of the explicitly competitive aspect of running - that is, The Race - allows for a more self-centred and non-comparative approach. Running as an individual pursuit is ‘continuous’. It involves continually improving your time and fitness as well as increasing the number of events that you do.

Training for a competitive race is a very different experience from training for a run. Training to compete means closure and a considerably higher level of intensity. I was watching the Brighton marathon with my father, who won the UK schoolboys’ 880 yards (roughly 800 metres) in 1961. He maintains that athletes in the 1960s and 1970s trained far faster and far harder than anyone today. His observations seem to tally with the decline of elite running.

There is a paradox here. At a time when more and more people are taking part in distance-running, Britain is producing fewer and fewer elite distance-runners. In 1984, there were 75 sub-2hr 20min British marathon runners. In 2009, there are just five. ‘The fastest’, reported the Telegraph, ‘is Andi Jones with two hours 15 minutes 20 seconds, good enough for 321st place in the world rankings, behind 169 Kenyans’.  This is not a relative decline, it is an absolute decline replicated in all the events from 800 metres upwards.

Several attempts have been made to explain this dramatic fall-off in British distance running, such as runners not training hard enough or not participating in cross-country events. I think technical factors such as this do play a part, but they do not explain the decline of distance-running as a whole. Others have noted the increasing role of charities in these events (see Running isn’t just for fun, by Alan Buckingham). A more likely candidate for explaining the decline is the rapid change in what it means to be a runner. Today, putting on your running shoes does not mean emulating the greats and aspiring to beat all-comers; it means beating your own time and becoming just that little bit fitter.

The moodiness of a long-suffering tennis player - A review of Andre Agassi autobiog 'Open'

 In spite of the headline-seeking, drug-taking confessions, Andre Agassi’s autobiography offers a fascinating insight into the inner life of a sporting great.

When I think of Andre Agassi, three things come to mind. First, there was his brash, outlandish and ‘inappropriate’ fashion sense. Second, there was his ability to ‘counter-punch’ and to return and neutralise the 135mph-plus serves that were threatening to dominate tennis in the 1990s. And third, there was his incredible revival from 141 in the world rankings in 1997 to world number one just two years later.

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Why Britain cannot find a Tennis Champion

I wrote this article last year and would be interested in feedback.  I will also have to eat humble pie if Murray wins this year.

During this year’s Wimbledon, I kept asking myself two questions: why did only one British male, Andy Murray, make a minor impact on the tournament, and why were British women so dire? What has happened to British tennis? 

The fact that it took the victory of British 14-year-old Laura Robson in the Wimbledon girls singles competition to stir the passions of a nation showed how low the expectations of the national tennis establishment have sunk. The great John Newcombe’s explanation of what is wrong with Australian tennis players rings true for British players, too. He told the BBC: ‘When they are training they think they are giving 100 per cent but they are only giving 60.’
 
I have been a tennis coach in the UK for 15 years now and I keep making similar criticisms to Newcombe’s, but find myself constantly accused of being ‘stuck in the past’ or of being ‘too motivated by winning’.

In my experience, there are three factors contributing to the failure of British tennis players on the international scene. Firstly, young tennis players in the UK are not as fit and not as determined or single-minded as their southern and east European counterparts. Second, the tennis bureaucracy in the UK is not able to tackle and overcome particular, negative sentiments held by its predominantly middle-class membership. Third, the competitive player base is shrinking. 

The elite tennis players that I have helped and observed in training are skilful and technically proficient. The problem is that they are neither pushed nor encouraged to push themselves hard enough. They rarely train to the point of exhaustion and an regrettable ‘stop when you’re tired’ attitude is ubiquitous. 

Spanish tennis offers an inspiring contrast. From the moment they step on court, Spanish tennis players start to work hard. At the end of gruelling physical sessions, Spanish players have to be stopped by their coaches. Their attitude to failure is noticeably different, too: they do not seem to be bothered by it. If they lose a point or are not playing in the way they want to in a particular training session, they will carry on regardless. 

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This attitude to the game could not be further from the British one. As a professional coach, I ‘hit’ with high level junior players and one of my biggest frustrations is how they tend to go on a downward spiral of sulking if they are not playing perfectly; their ‘failure’ continually affects them instead of spurring them on to learn from their mistakes and do better next time.

This attitude can be found in the coaching world as well. In the past, if an elite player approached a coach we would assume they could already play. The coach’s attitude would have been: ‘We can work on the mental approach and your competitive side but you are expected to give 100 per cent.’ We would not have to put up with tantrums, mood swings or the whole plethora of bad excuses that is now used to explain away youthful inconsistency and poor performance.

Moreover, the role for coaches has been expanded to include personal support for issues which have nothing to do with tennis. As well as being physical and technical coaches, we are now expected to act as psychotherapists, social workers and motivational self-help gurus. This new coaching approach is wholly endorsed by the Lawn Tennis Association (LTA).

Aside from running Wimbledon, a world-class tournament, one fortnight a year, the LTA is a national joke. But, except for during Wimbledon, the LTA is rarely in the spotlight and its monumental failures are not subject to any significant media or public pressure. In addition, the inevitable one-off wins for those British players outside the world’s top 200 who are given ‘wild card’ entry stave off criticism of generally woeful under performance. The LTA is still able to wheel out the same tired excuses and reassurances that ‘things are improving at a grass roots level’.

Instead of producing world-class elite tennis players, the LTA, as other members of the new ‘sporting bureaucracy’ in the UK, like Sport England, has imposed draconian restrictions on volunteers and coaches. Under the guise of ‘professionalisation’, the LTA introduced licensing schemes for all coaches as well as mandatory attendance on child protection and health and safety courses. Alongside this, the LTA deploys a rigid and secluded coaching structure. The LTA dislikes the Spanish coaching system - and just about any other successful system in the world. The LTA is the self-appointed governing body of tennis - and everyone has to toe the line. Despite a woeful track record, it still monopolises the training of elite players and will not let anyone else in, except by their own appointment. Coaches’ licenses are withheld and one simply cannot take part in training elite tennis players if one does not adhere to everything the LTA dictates.

Paradoxically, the LTA should be all too well aware of the shrinking competitive player base in the UK. In 1998, an audit of UK tennis was conducted and steps were taken to improve participation, particularly amongst children. In the 10 years since, the number of children actively participating in tennis on a weekly basis has fallen from one in eight to one in 20. Membership of tennis clubs in the UK has fallen dramatically as has the competitive player base. Alongside sports such as athletics, the number of competitive tennis players has dwindled to the extent that the number of tournaments and competitions held has been drastically reduced. Without the week-in-week-out competition of leagues and tournaments, the critical mass of competitive players falls. This statistical appraisal in the Independent newspaper demonstrates the problem: ‘Now compare the number of clubs in Britain (2,400, down from 5,000 a decade ago) with the number in France (10,000). France has one million licensed adult players and 500,000 licensed juniors. Britain has around 100,000 licensed players in total and the LTA says there are only a few thousand juniors regularly playing competitive tennis (20 or more matches a year) at any level.’ (1)

That children and adults are now encouraged to play tennis as a ‘healthy activity’ has contributed to stemming the tide of adults leaving the game. This trend has also been seen in the massive increase in the number of those who now consider themselves to be ‘runners’. Unfortunately, the increase in numbers of participants simply does not equate to a rise in the level of elite performance. It is what one is participating in that will raise the standard not just the ‘taking part’.

That we cannot produce a championship winning British tennis player is a loss because it fails to inspire and sets a limit on the ambitions of young players. The therapeutic and holistic approach to coaching will continue to inhibit the self-discipline intrinsic to excellence and achievement. My advice to British tennis players is to ignore the LTA, work very hard physically, be brilliant on court, and learn to play in Spain.

A Step in the Wrong Direction

Pedometers for children are the latest weapon in the War on Obesity. But mere 'activity' is a poor substitute for vigorous and pleasurable sports.

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New Labour is encouraging our children to get active by giving them a pedometer - a small digital device that clips on to the user’s belt - to count how many steps they take each day. While this may have some success in the short term, the obsession with ‘activity’ is a poor substitute for the kind of vigorous exercise, and pleasurable engagement, that comes with sport.

In November 2005, the then minister for public health, Caroline Flint, launched the government’s Schools on the Move pilot project (1). The aim was to stop our children getting any fatter or, as they say in government circles these days, to meet the public service agreement target to ‘halt by the year 2010 the year-on-year increase of obesity among children under eleven’. The idea was to increase the amount of activity nine- to 14-year-olds partake in. In the pilot scheme, children in 50 schools were issued with pedometers; it was deemed to be a success a year later when 43 of the pilot schools said they would like to participate in an extended version of the programme. In September 2007, Schools on the Move will be extended to include 45,000 children in 250 schools. The recipients are all from what are deemed ‘deprived’ areas.

As a sports coach for the past 15 years, I have seen policies come and go (mostly go). I first encountered this latest initiative in July, when the children who were taking part in my tennis camp started turning up with pedometers, claiming that tennis was good because it made them do x number of steps per session. Two things instantly struck me about the government’s pedometer policy: it is utterly pointless, and it reveals a depressing lack of ambition.

Since the 1980s, in the UK children’s sport has been emptied of its competitive content. What was once sport is now often just ‘exercise’ or ‘activity’. One of the main reasons for this is that sport and health have become ever more closely tied together; culturally they are now seen as being almost interchangeable. Consider who initiated the pedometer scheme: the Department of Health, the Department for Education and Skills, the Youth Sport Trust Project and the British Heart Foundation’s Centre for Physical Activity. These days, you would be very hard pressed to find a sports policy in the UK that is not backed by some health organisation.

When sport is reduced to the formal aspects of activity and exercise alone, it is degraded and hollowed out. As an activity, pedometer-use is one step removed from even this form of downgraded activity. Pedometers are mere measuring tools. There is very little evidence that pedometers are of any use in increasing the amount of physical activity that children take, let alone that they are becoming fitter or more healthy as a result of pedometer-use. In assessing the pilot scheme, the government’s evidence seemed little more than anecdotal.

Announcing the extended scheme in July this year, public health minister Dawn Primarolo said: ‘Pedometers have been proven to increase the amount of physical activity undertaken by not only young people but by their families as well. When this scheme was piloted, we found that children were so keen to improve their step count they often persuaded their families to get more active by going for things like a country walk, or visiting local fitness clubs.’ (2) This demonstrates a further flaw in the policymakers’ approach to sport and health: they prefer quantity over quality.

With this emphasis on quantity, the use of pedometers to improve health and fitness is flawed in two ways. Firstly, although pedometers may measure an increase in the amount of activity (although not necessarily encourage it), they cannot measure the quality of exercise. Going for a walk or run is okay, but it is not the same in terms of quality as playing in a full-on competitive sports event. The latter is almost always harder, even though it may produce the same number of steps as a country walk. The steps I take if I am boxing or playing a football match are different from those that I take when I’m just walking.

The emphasis on quantity over quality is also apparent in the drive to raise the number of children taking part in sport. This usually means that the activity has to be ‘dumbed down’ by being made easier, or reduced to the banal in order to encourage every child to take part. Exercise physiologist Brendan Hayes, who has worked using pedometers before, says: ‘With pedometers it’s a quantity issue. They only measure a very small aspect of physical fitness. In every respect, it’s inferior to sport proper. The children will dump them within a couple of weeks.’ (3)

The sports policies I have seen in recent years always seem to have a gimmicky nature, and the pedometer scheme is no exception. Now, sports and ‘activity’ policies are being merged with other areas of the school curriculum, particularly maths and science. Hannah Sharpe of the Youth Sport Trust says: ‘The children are using the number of steps they have taken to learn about graphs. What’s more, the kids love it.’ (4) The fad-like quality of these policies means that children become bored with them very quickly. Wearing a pedometer is not as much fun as riding a bike or playing basketball. Imagine an Enid Blyton scenario: ‘“Come on Johnny!” said Lucy. “Let’s get the pedometers out, we haven’t used them for months and they were such fun!”’

Winning at sports is a struggle, both physical and mental. The traditional sports also provide a benchmark and standard with which children can measure their performance against others. When you are competing in sport you have to keep up with the opposition and your teammates or you run the risk of losing or being dropped from the team. It is this aspect of competition that inspires children, not the hollow and banal pedometer schemes that are currently being dished out to the underprivileged.

Dan Travis is director of the Brighton Salon and is currently writing a book on the end of competition in schools.

(1) School pedometer scheme launched, GNN, 7 November 2005

(2) Getting kids to step in the right direction, GNN, 13 July 2007

(3) Bright Media interview with Brendan Hayes, 15 August 2007

(4) Case study 6: Pedometers help get ‘Schools on the move’, Department of Health

Giving Competitive Dads the Red Card

With its new ‘Respect’ agenda, the Football Association is demonising a key figure in youth sport: demanding dads.

The folk devil of the pushy parent has a powerful hold over the popular imagination - from the competitive dad in comedy sketches to the hothousing insanity of mums taking their child’s school entrance exams in John O’Farrell’s satirical novel May Contain Nuts. The Football Association (FA), therefore, will probably face little criticism for its campaign, announced this week, against overaggressive parents.

The aim of the FA’s new campaign is to encourage respect for football referees and for young players. Football bosses are worried that parents shouting from the sidelines are stopping people from becoming referees, putting kids off the game and ruining the experience of other parents watching their kids play. The FA’s decision to tackle errant parents is part of its ‘Respect’ campaign, which focuses on misguided and inappropriate behaviour on the part of over-competitive fathers. An internet film accompanying the campaign, which ‘aims to improve parental behaviour’, stars Ray Winstone in a double role: as wild-eyed, pit-bull parent and also as his reprimanding FA saviour.

The reasoning behind the new touchline guidelines goes like this: some children are put under too much pressure by their parents; this pressure prevents them from practicing ‘skills’ and forces them instead to focus on performance and end results; too much pressure puts children off taking up football.

The Respect campaign is a logical extension of last year’s decision by Sir Trevor Brooking, the FA’s director of football development, to stop the publication of children’s football match results. Apparently, to report publicly that Torquay Tigers won a seven-nil victory over Portsmouth Panthers would put far too much pressure on the game’s young participants, impacting on their self-esteem.

The FA’s new campaign preys upon a ‘parents are the problem’ mentality that is now ubiquitous in the UK, particularly within competitive sports. This effort to re-educate parents will only increase suspicion and intervention by the petty-minded, unimaginative, vindictive bureaucratic do-gooders who are, in fact, the real threat to children’s quality of life and to sport in Britain today.

The Respect campaign is the result of a number of social trends that have convinced the FA to act against competitive dads. Firstly, there is the rise of therapeutic education, which reduces schooling to simply a matter of raising self-esteem. The spill-over of the therapeutic impulse into sports coaching and policy has been significant. This is evident in the policy of inclusion that has been adopted by all the major sports governing bodies, and which has become a condition for getting funding for sports activities from New Labour’s shiny new burgeoning bureaucracy, Sport England - the government agency which aims to create opportunities for people of all ages and abilities to play sport in the community.

Alongside the therapeutic tendency there has been the decline of competition. Many parents and politicians lament the decline of school sports day and the relative decline of British national teams. The absence of competition has serious consequences for children who will be unprepared for future challenges and who are missing out on a valuable life lesson.

Of these two trends, it is the therapeutic one that is considerably stronger in society at large and which has been institutionalised. But within children’s sports, a strange compromise has been reached which attempts to accommodate both the therapeutic and anti-competitive tendencies. Sport is now being promoted as a strange form of non-competitive, inclusive competition. And in this context, the competitive dad or the pushy parent is public enemy number one.

Blaming parents for just about everything is a trend that is widespread in society, but which is having a negative impact on sport in particular. In the final part of the alarmist ‘Respect’ video, an ‘FA welfare officer’ gives his opinion on how badly the dad in the video is behaving. The FA has carved out a new role for itself as a social policeman. In fact, parents can be awarded a ‘certificate of respect’ if they answer correctly the FA’s questions on appropriate behaviour. This unbelievably patronising offer has to be seen to be believed - click here to see it for yourself.

Sport does not lend itself well to the new culture of therapy. That’s because sport is a space in life where we can test ourselves and where we can directly compete in ways that are not possible in other social or informal activities. Through a system of esoteric rules, in sport we can be as competitive as we like, without having to worry about everyday politics or the rules of society in general. However, when society’s concerns invade the competitive space, then sport and competition become degraded. And today, society has almost conquered the sporting arena, as can be seen in the marriage of sport and health policy in recent years, in the development of sport-related role-model and mentoring programmes for errant youth, and in the policing of athletics for drug use.

It is curious that football has become the focus of the FA’s Respect campaign, its desire to ‘include’ more young people in sport. Because unlike tennis and many other sports, football does not have a crisis of participation. In fact, it might be seen as the cause of the crisis of participation in most other sports, because everyone is playing football. Yet the real concern behind the ‘inclusion’ mantra is what kind of inclusion children are getting through sport. As the FA’s ‘Respect’ manual says: ‘We all know how much children can get out of football and as parents we all want to be as supportive as we can. But is the support you are giving appropriate?’

In other words, it is ‘inappropriate support’, pressure and shouting that is putting children off playing football - allegedly. The use of the word ‘inclusive’ in this context betrays its true origins. Being inclusive does not mean, as common sense would suggest, allowing more children into the game. ‘Inclusivity’ is actually a code of behaviour that requires niceness at all times, and simultaneously a lowering of the standards required to participate. Anything that may put off an child from participating in a sport is deemed to be bullying, elitism or ‘excluding’ - and therefore wrong.

As George Paralolista, a father and a player who has been through the ranks, says: ‘I would not put up with anyone telling me that I cannot watch my son play football and cheer at the same time. This policy is not going to help the game or be of any benefit to children whatsoever, it’s just anti-competition in disguise.’

The question of how the new policy regarding cheering parents will be enforced should be a cause for concern for all of us. The consequences of enforced ‘respect’ on the touchline will be to increase tension between adults, to corrode adult-child relations and to bring out the worst in everyone. The most damaging consequence is likely to be an increase in degraded snitching on the side of the pitch, brought about by heightened suspicion between adults over who is behaving ‘appropriately’ and who is not.

The PC, bureaucratic ‘bod’ who plans to police the playing of the beautiful game amongst children should fill parents and sports coaches with horror; we should defend competitive dads. As a lifelong coach, I can see that the desire to reintroduce competition in its pure, untampered form is growing amongst parents and children, who are agitated by the demands of the therapeutic and the anti-competition lobbies. Their desire to return to the days of ‘win, win, win’ needs to be given a voice.

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