Children: Competitive Sport

Lord Addington Excerpts

Monday 24th February 2014 Grand Committee

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend for tabling this debate, although I fear that when I read the articles about Surrey, I understood why they are bringing that provision in. To deal with that first, rugby union is a game where physical size and strength are important. If you have a group of children who are bigger earlier, they do not compete; they smash down and defeat their opponents and drive them down. They gain nothing in terms of competition from being bigger and stronger; they do not actually have to be very good at the game; and those that they are walking over do not benefit from that either. That is why, in a club game, it is now encouraged that if someone matures earlier, you stick them in with older people. Thus, that article becomes more understandable. When someone says, “You’re taking away the trophy from my children and my club”, I say, “If you’re judging the success of your club by a trophy won by under-nines, go away and have a think about yourself”. That is my take on that.

When it comes to competition, I do not know a sporting activity in which competition is not involved. Competition does not mean the end result but the process by which you undertake these games—how, in any team sport where you have a ball, you move that ball around to achieve your ends. How you teach people to run and receive the ball within the confines of that game is the essential competitive element from which a score can be derived. The competition is the build-up, part of the structure, the movement and the correct way in which you do that. People get obsessed about scores, results and league tables that they can publish and point at—and they are often the people who are not taking part in the sporting activity.

In concentrating on the true competitive element—that is, getting somebody in a competition where the outcome is not more or less predetermined—you are creating competition. By evening the sides out, you create it. Why do you have first, second and third teams in adult sport, in amateur games? It is so that you have even competitive results. The RFU is removing trophies from its junior ranks because they are meaningless for the adult game. The idea that you should have a contest on as even terms as you can get, where the result is not guaranteed, is essential. If we can bring this into the youth policy, it means making sure that people are trained properly to create these situations.

To go back again to rugby union, the sport I know full well, it was probably the worst game for children ever at full 15 level on a full 15 pitch. “Let’s put the winger out there and see if he gets hypothermia first or dies of boredom”, because the ball is too big for him to carry and the pitch too big. All team sports suffer from this to an extent. Rugby is probably the worst, but I remember Trevor Brooking recently saying something about having a full-sized pitch and small children, and how the biggest kid who can kick it down the field and then win it in the air will win you the game. Half of both teams become irrelevant.

Therefore, when we are talking about competition, look at the essence of what it is. Forget about the league tables and the junior trophies. Let us talk about the really difficult bit: creating a situation in which someone gets something out of that process of competing with someone on as even terms as possible. It ain’t going to be for everyone, but most of us will benefit far more from having that skill than we will from not having it.