Tuesday 5 October 2010

Tournament to go ahead shocker

The East Africa Cup will happen in 2011, thanks to funding from the Norwegian Embassy.

With the confirmation, planning can begin in earnest for next year's event. It's excellent news for all involved - well done team.

The tournament, which brings together young people in a spirit of sport, fellowship and education, should be even better this year.

In other sports news there's a lot to get frustrated about in the field of professional sports: whether it's unfaithful footballers, match-fixing cricket players, athletes pulling out of the Commonwealth Games in Delhi, it seems the papers are full of people who get paid to do sport behaving badly.

For people using sport as a tool for community development in poorer countries the choice made by some athletes not to travel is ominous. When 'elite athletes' refuse to compete in countries where they can't live in levels of luxury denied to billions on a day to day basis, you know there's a problem. Where once sport used to be a leveller between rich and poor nations, you might get the impression the lucky multi-millionaires at the top end of the success spectrum don't care about the ordinary sports fan.

And yet there are plenty of sportspeople who live up to their status as a role model. Some give quietly or do work in their community, others realise their name can add to an event.

These include David Beckham (who incidentally attended a Bobby Charlton Soccer School as a youth)who recently launched a football academy in Trinidad and Craig Bellamy whose foundation in Sierra Leone is about education as much as it is sport: http://www.craigbellamyfoundation.org/

This got me thinking - with next year's EAC in the planning which players do you think could represent the event?

1 comment: