My day began with a wet morning on the touchline, watching the 13 year-old's team win 5-3, thus clinching promotion. Rain, rain, mud and not a cup of Bovril in sight. The poor referee hardly had a moment's peace from the opposition side's endlessly aggrieved parents. Then it was back home to read Portsmouth goalie David James in the Observer. For a moment I thought I was hallucinating. Not content with musing on the idea of reimbursing his team's fans for a sub-standard performance, he has swapped his German gas-guzzler for something more environmentally-friendly:
... I've gone for a rapeseed oil conversion. Sounds odd, I know. It's basically a conversion on my diesel engine to enable it to run on rapeseed oil, which is a carbon-neutral fuel. You get a pump and a tank of the stuff installed at your house and if you run out of rapeseed halfway up the M4 you can always put diesel in as usual. It's as efficient as diesel and works out to around 91p per litre. The whole thing cost me £2,500. Now I've just got to convince Harry [Redknapp] and the lads to get a tank installed at the training ground
Over at 101 Great Goals, they're discussing the dearth of black managers, while Jim White has written another of his heartening pieces about the role of sport in education. This time he's been taking to the headmaster of a rugby-playing school in the heart of football-mad Dagenham:
When Grant took over as head in 1997, it wasn't like this. "We called it Stalingrad," he says. "Every day was a siege that you felt lucky to come out of alive." His first task was to conduct an audit of the pupils: he reckoned of the 1,200 enrolled, 400 were out of control. To re-establish discipline he excluded hundreds, causing a furore locally. But the thing that made an immediate difference was rugby. There was a bunch of 13-year-olds causing mayhem. Since they liked a scrap, they were formed into a rugby team and pitched into competitive matches.
"I never signed up to the agenda that competitive sport is bad," says Grant. "It was an essential vehicle for us. Nobody ever praised these boys. They were white, working class, everyone told them they were scum. Through rugby we could change the script, say to them, 'you know what lads, you're great'."
What happened next sounds like a Hollywood teen movie. Through winning matches and cups, the bad boys became ambassadors. The lessons of discipline and application learnt in rugby fed through into Maths, English, Science. Soon they were achieving academically as well as on the pitch, providing a completely new role model. Sport changed not just them, but the school.
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