• Administrator now in position to take sole control
• HMRC drops threat to challenge Andronikou

Peter Storrie stays at Portsmouth with a salary of “less than £500,000″. With money so tight it seems rather a charitable decision to retain the chief executive on such a salary.

After all Storrie was present throughout the chaotic period that has seen Pompey’s bank accounts withdrawn, a transfer embargo imposed and four owners in the space of one season. Digger, however, hears tell that Storrie may yet have to justify his position to the administrator, Andrew Andronikou, anew, possibly as soon as today. That is because with Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs threatening to challenge Andronikou’s appointment, an existing director had to be retained in case the challenge was upheld.

By law every company must have a nominated officer. Following the departures of the directors Mark Jacob and Tanya Robbins, Storrie was the only person left on the club’s board. HMRC has now withdrawn its challenge – seemingly the thought of throwing taxpayers’ money at an arcane legal argument that would not lead to any financial return has caused it to do so – but the taxman will no doubt have other questions when everyone heads back to court on Monday.

With Andronikou in a position to take sole control of Portsmouth, whether Storrie is present could be telling.

Second-hand stats

Npower launched its seven-figure sponsorship deal with England 2018 yesterday by saying that hosting the World Cup would be worth £3.2bn to the nation. Have we not heard that number somewhere before? The accountancy firm PricewaterhouseCoopers came up with the same figure when it launched its England 2018 sponsorship in November. Npower says it has surveyed 3,000 business leaders but when Digger asked who they were and what questions they had been asked Npower’s marketing agency said it could not release that information. Might the energy firm have taken the principles of reusing, reducing and recycling too far?

Local knowledge

ITV News has responded to the BBC’s

The Racing For Change project has talked of X Factor-style promotions. What’s the going rate for a sport’s self-respect?

Racing For Change, the project designed to save our sport, is a slippery beast. Scant detail is understood about this enigmatic creature, though it is known to have existed for more than a year now. Whether by accident or design, it is difficult to corner, tag and categorise. You think you have it by the tail and it sheds it for another. Sometimes you’d like to throttle it.

One thing is clear: it lives in close confinement with a large elephant that goes by the name of Funding. Any restructuring of the income stream to British racing, which currently relies on a percentage of dwindling eligible bookmaker profits, does not lie within RFC’s remit. Racing’s fundamental problem will not be addressed.

Even within this status quo it is yet to be decided how to measure RFC’s worth. One device is whether, by a date presumably to be agreed, it succeeds in increasing racing’s share of the betting pound. Another is whether it grows media-rights income from nearly nothing to something. Inexplicably no target figure for augmented sponsorship has yet been set either.

How the concept of “premierisation” – enabling racing’s best events to occupy the foreground of the sport’s attention more effectively – will work in practice cannot yet be said. Start talking detail, such as whether promoting a core Flat season that starts with the Guineas and ends with an unspecified finale risks ghettoising the existing bookends, and you’re told this is a package aimed at the irregular consumer, that nothing will really change for the racing fan.

Here there seems to be a disconnect proposed between what racing will mean to Us, the fans, and Them, the wider public, whom RFC implies live an entirely different existence. This discontinuity was also evident in RFC’s recent headline proposals for a team competition and celebrity-led, X Factor-style approach.

Latching on to celebrities – awkwardly grafted on to promote a sport they are paid to attend, replete with their sometimes damaging moral baggage – or to the previous decade’s big TV idea is so far behind the curve, it’s flat-lined. RFC says consumers “welcomed the idea of a series they could follow over a short period of time”.

Are these the focus groups who said they’d go to pubs if smoking was banned? Imagine these serial theoretical opinion-givers went so far as to attend Strictly Come Racing with Brave Cheryl Tweedy. How does the concept pay its way? What is the going rate for a sport’s soul and self-respect anyway?

How you engage an occasional audience in everyday racing – the stuff that pays the bills – continues to be overlooked. Little effort has been made to hook those who already boost racecourse attendances when an evening music concert is scheduled. Making a lasting connection while new blood is in your backyard should be a priority for Racing For Change.

Racing also doesn’t look after its existing customers – the sport’s primary recruiting officers for the next generation – well enough. This means communicating better, providing accurate information, access to relevant technology and a higher standard of service.

This is a viable target more pertinent to the sport’s success than turning an envious eye to the attention enjoyed by football and a blind one to its flirtation with financial implosion.

Racing For Change has undoubtedly bought breathing space and goodwill with its extensive strategy of consultation. This should not be confused with approbation, however. Perhaps its ambition is hard to pin down because, unless it is an attempt to be all things to all people, it has not decided what it is yet either. But the clock is ticking on the chameleon act.

guardian.co.uk

]]> http://worldbbnews.com/2010/03/12/is-someone-suggesting-we-have-strictly-come-gee-gees-well-forget-it/feed/ 0 http://worldbbnews.com/2010/03/12/harry-pearson-british-managers-are-under-threat/ http://worldbbnews.com/2010/03/12/harry-pearson-british-managers-are-under-threat/#comments Fri, 12 Mar 2010 00:10:02 +0000 Editor http://worldbbnews.com/2010/03/12/harry-pearson-british-managers-are-under-threat/

Rediscovering their once-famous identity could help home-grown gaffers to avoid extinction

This week Harry Redknapp has been speaking up on behalf of one of the world’s most endangered species, the British manager. The British manager is football’s answer to the white rhino. Except of course that nobody believes that eating a British football manager’s nose will cure impotence.

“Every club will have a foreign owner eventually and you’ll get less British managers,” Redknapp said on Monday in one of those plaintive calls for biodiversity we usually expect to hear from the Duke of Edinburgh shortly before he blows something away with a 12-bore.

“Mark Hughes was doing a terrific job at Man City. But new owners want to bring in somebody they have heard of. There are some terrific managers in the Championship and below who just need the chance. But a big club will always go for that sexy name,” Redknapp claimed.

The latter may seem rather a bizarre pronouncement, but let us not forget that the human libido is a strange and mysterious thing. While it may seem incredible to you and I that anyone should experience even the ghost of arousal when they hear the words “Rafael Benítez” or “Avram Grant”, it must be acknowledged that football club owners are a different breed from the rest of us. Who is to say that the very thought of Guus Hiddink or Louis van Gaal doesn’t have some of the oligarchs and oil barons reaching for the Kleenex? After all, as Redknapp wisely points out, more and more of them are foreigners and we all know what they are like, the saucy devils.

Redknapp’s words have re-ignited the debate about the fate of the British manager and much of what has been written since has conjured up a nightmare vision in which the innocent if bumbling UK gaffer is hunted to extinction by uncaring immigrants in much the same way the white settlers exterminated the American buffalo. Indeed, it is hard not to envisage an horrific scene in which a vast herd of thousands of British bosses gambol merrily about on the open grasslands of Lilleshall or Hackney Marshes, moving cones, organising card schools and making sure nobody eats any spicy continental grub on match days, while unbeknownst to them a gang of ruthless transatlantic hunters approach down wind, picking up the tell-tale British manager scent of shaving soap, dubbin and embrocation.

As he slots a shell into his rifle, the leader of the marksmen, Roman Abramovich in all likelihood, mutters, “Shoot the leader of the herd first otherwise the rest’ll be spooked”, and a few seconds later Sir Alex Ferguson has crumpled to the turf emitting a last embittered tirade about the amount of injury time that was played on Saturday.

By the end of the day the plain is strewn with the carcasses of British managers, already stripped of their valuable pelts of nylon and polyester warm-up coats, which are then shipped off to mainland Europe to be turned into hats for fashionable Parisian ladies. Later, a man will come in a cart and gather up the bones to turn into fertiliser for the playing surfaces of San Siro and Camp Nou.

To be honest, though, I think British football managers have been their own worst enemies. There was a time when if you cut a British football manager he’d bleed winceyette pyjamas, hot water bottles and custard creams, but in recent years all but a few have abandoned their Britishness to chase what they fondly believe are modern methods. Out have gone good old British staples such as mangling foreign names (Joe Mercer always called Johan Cruyff “Cruffy”), paring brown suede shoes with tracksuit bottoms and becoming so obsessed with signs and portents that they had to wear their suit back to front, step on the cracks on the way to the ground and never use the definite article on match days. Instead they have embraced pro-zone, holistic dentistry and vibrating warm-down chairs.

The result is that these days the British manager, with honourable exceptions such as Redknapp, Sir Alex and Roy Hodgson, who is very much a gentleman PE Teacher from the Alec Stock mould, is no longer recognisable. Even Sam Allardyce, apparently the most sturdily British of all our managers, is more concerned with motivational psychology and Feng Shui than he is with standing in the pouring rain yelling dog’s abuse at his players as they each carry a small pit pony up a slagheap for the 15th time.

And this to my mind is the problem. Because if we look at the world at large we can see that the British companies that are most successful are those that place a heavy emphasis on their Britishness: Burberry, Aquascutum, Barbour – foreigners love these brands. Even in France they like traditional British things. There’s hardly a posh restaurant in Paris theses days that doesn’t have apple crumble on the menu.

In continental Europe they used to love British football managers too. That’s why in Spain the coach is always called “Mister”. But that was back when British managers were undeniably British. Maybe it’s too late to turn back the clock, but if Mark Hughes is serious about his career I’d drop the Armani suits and start wearing a trilby hat and a monkey-shit brown mac over my tracksuit from now on.

• Harry Redknapp

Harry Pearson

guardian.co.uk

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