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David Cameron may bold enough to bomb Colonel Gaddafi but has he got the bottle to take on his own country’s football lobby?
I raise the question because of growing concern that the same back-stabbing cabal which did for Kate Hoey as Labour’s sports minister ten years ago apparently has it in for present Tory incumbent Hugh Robertson.
There is no doubt that the long knives are out for the minister, who has had the temerity to similarly deliver a few timely home – and away – truths about the running of a game which clearly considers itself beyond either reform or reproach.
It was the ear-blowing campaign orchestrated by a clique of football’s so-called power-brokers from the Premier League and Football Association which led to Hoey being replaced, because the then Prime Minister Tony Blair was shamefully persuaded, via his influential henchman Alastair Campbell, that she was not sufficiently ‘on message’ with the game’s interests.
Hoey was politically out-manoeuvred but the hope is that former army officer Robertson has the armoury to resist the insidious sniping, and that Cameron, whom he prominently supported for the party leadership, will kick the whispering lobbyists into touch.
We heard the prickly bigwigs are less than enamoured that Robertson has told it as it is – that football needs to be better governed and is the worst run of all major sports in this country.
He has called the governance arrangements around the FA “a disgrace” and says the body is “stuck in a time warp.” His call for radical reform, with Government regulation as a last resort, has clearly rattled the football hierarchy, and pressure is being put on Robertson’s immediate boss, Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt, and ultimately the prime minister, to bring him to heel.
Robertson must be backed and encouraged to stick to his guns, not least by a PM who claims to believe in plain speaking.
Although I have never voted Tory in my life, I happen to like Robertson and think he is doing a decent job within the obvious limitations of the role.
Not only is he a genuine and knowledgeable sports fan but like Hoey he strives to be a minister for all sports, and not just football.
And there’s the rub.
It seems he is now fighting to keep his place in Cameron’s team because he has told those who run football to raise their game. And they simply don’t like it up ’em.
They are bleating to whoever will listen in the media at Westminster that Robertson “isn’t a football man” and doesn’t have the game’s interests at heart, which simply isn’t true.
What is true is that English football administrators have shown themselves to be as inept off the field when it matters as the national team has been on it.
Their respective attempts at winning World Cups for this country are woeful.
Of course we are repeatedly and smugly told that the Premier League is the best in the world.
But would that be so without foreign aid? The massive infusion of overseas money and talent via owners, managers and players? Or, indeed, without the bankrolling by Rupert Murdoch via BSkyB?
Robertson (pictured above left with Sir Geoff Hurst) is right. Football needs to be shaken up from top to bottom but the small-minded businessmen and blazers who appoint themselves to high office seem incapable of doing it, and shun the assistance of professionals who have been there and done it.
It is time the surreptitious ear-bending ceased and they actually opened their own ears to what Robertson has been saying. Not least his evidence this week to the now-concluded parliamentary inquiry (the establishment of which football clearly resented).
These were his words: “Every one of the FA directors is white, male and middle-aged. There is no-one who has played the game to a reasonable level and no women or anyone from the ethnic communities. No change is no option.”
He added: “This is not a fight I wanted but things are sufficiently bad to do something about it and it is not going to be pleasant. There is going to be an awful lot of backbitng.”
How prescient. And how brave the words in these days of mealy-mouthed politics.
I happen to think that 48-year-old Robertson is more in tune with grass roots sport, surely where it really matters, than some of his predecessors. And certainly not as self-important.
While the pampered denizens of world sport were swanning off in their luxury limos or hired Thames launches to the swish gala dinner at the O2 from the SportAccord convention recently, we caught up with him legging it to Waterloo to take the Jubilee Line.
The same day he had been knocked by some for meeting with Britain’s canoeists rather than observe the dragging-on proceedings at that Parliamentary inquiry into football.
There are certainly Coalition figures who covet Robertson’s job, especially with Olympic year approaching, and are more than willing to put the boot in on behalf of the footy whingers.
But when Cameron is next nudged to get his minister, who happens to be a Chelsea fan, more “on message” – or if not get rid of him – he should repeat his advice to that po-faced heckler on the Opposition front bench this week: “Calm down dear.” And let Robertson continue blowing the whistle before it is too late.
Alan Hubbard is an award-winning sports columnist for The Independent on Sunday, and a former sports editor of The Observer. He has covered a total of 16 Summer and Winter Olympics, 10 Commonwealth Games, several football World Cups and world title fights from Atlanta to Zaire