Time to believe the Olympic dream

As you will no doubt tire of hearing by the end of the day, today marks exactly one year until the start of the London 2012 Olympic Games. The media have set up camp at the Olympic Park in Stratford to offer us guided tours of the venues, and Lord Coe will be doing the rounds and seemingly attempting to break the world record for the most recorded interviews in one day.

Venues on time and under budget

Having seen some of the early coverage I feel nothing but excitement about next year’s Games. The venues look fantastic and there is a real sense of pride about the world’s top sports men and women heading to my home city in a bid to make history. Listening to Lord Coe speak on the news this morning also reassures you that the event is being led by a man with sports at his heart, and whose passion and influence has been integral to ensuring that all venues are complete on time and under budget.

Aside from sports, we will today hear of the long-lasting benefits that the Olympics will bring to the communities of East London and beyond. The Olympic Village will be converted into affordable housing for local people; the handball arena will become a multi-purpose community sports facility; and the park itself - the biggest UK new park created in a century - will be open to the public. In addition, the new Westfield Shopping Centre will open its doors this Autumn with the shops, restaurants and multiplex cinema all creating jobs as well as helping to give an ailing area a huge shot in the arm.

This is the party line of course, and whilst I have bought it, many remain sceptical about the real benefits of hosting the Olympics. They claim that money used to fund the project could have been better spent tackling the country’s deficit - saving people from the cuts we have seen over the last year. They also claim that the months of disruption before during and after the Olympics - Transport for London’s Olympic Route Network will see lanes available only to Olympic athletes and officials and many pedestrian crossings will be removed - will bring the city to a standstill and put local people in danger at the same time.

Many also remain angry about the ticketing allocation process. LOCOG’s system of effectively drawing tickets out of the hat for oversubscribed events meant that thousands of British people - including relatives of competing athletes - will have to make do with watching the Games at home on TV.

I can understand the justification for these concerns, but in my view I don’t think they come close to matching the benefits of hosting the Olympics. The funding argument is not exactly black and white for example: yes we have a huge deficit and yes on the face of it, the money spent on the Olympics would have plugged a significant hole in out finances. But there wasn’t a straight choice between spending money on the Olympics or reducing the deficit. The money was only available because the Olympics presents income opportunities through ticket sales and investment opportunities such as the Westfield Shopping Centre and the new housing that will be available on site. Funnily enough, investors aren’t so forthcoming when you ask for money without offering anything in return.

The disruption is something that I believe to be a more justified concern. There will undoubtedly be traffic problems because of the Olympic Route Network, and it’s perfectly feasible that small businesses within the host boroughs - Newham, Hackney, Greenwich, Tower Hamlets, Waltham Forest and Barking & Dagenham - will suffer from this increased traffic and restricted delivery times. Removing pedestrian crossings may also bring potential for increased road accidents and public transport will also feel the strain as a result of the many visitors heading to venues across the city.

However, there is a year to go to develop the best possible solutions for these concerns. Given the efficiency with which the park has been constructed, I have faith that TfL and the Olympic authorities will reach a compromise. There will of course still be disruption, but there will have to be an element of Londoners biting the bullet; seeing the bigger picture that the Games will showcase London to the world and that the benefits are designed to be delivered over a generation, not a two week period.

In terms of ticketing, I must confess to being one of the lucky ones who managed to get tickets through the allocation process. I’ll be heading to the hockey, handball and boxing; not marquee events but I am delighted to have the opportunity to sample the Olympics at first hand in some way. So having been successful with my application my views may be biased, but I genuinely think LOCOG have been given an unfairly hard time over the process. Let’s be realistic: it’s not possible for everyone in the country to go the Olympics; some people will have to miss out. 

To complain that you didn’t get any tickets even though you applied isn’t really a strong enough argument; most people in the country applied and that’s why so many were unsuccessful in the allocation process. I hope I would feel the same if I had missed out on tickets too, but having failed to get a ticket for Oasis at Knebworth in 2006, I feel the pain of all those who hoped but failed with their application. Trust me on that one; it hurt.

So whilst by the end of today I will probably be sick to death of seeing the word “Olympics”,  for now I remain utterly captivated by the build up and cannot wait for the Games to start. The organisers have done a quite brilliant job in delivering the venues under budget and on time, and now deserve the nation’s backing. We as the home crowd can play our part in making this a memorable Olympic Games, but we can only do that by celebrating what’s in store not dreading it, and showing off London and the rest of the UK to the world.


I for one cannot wait.

Twitter should not tell the story, not be the story

After a few weeks of well earned rest, CBM has returned from its holidays and is ready for the season to begin again. Ok so we’re still a few weeks away from the big kick off, but the Scottish league started this weekend, and that’s enough for me to consider that football is once again back in our lives.

Twitter now common for players

Like some of you, I’ve been able to follow the fortunes of the Premier League’s stars on their expensive holidays via Twitter. Wayne Rooney seemed to travel half-way around the world to sing in a karaoke bar, Rio Ferdinand made his way to Asia - still promoting his many business interests of course - and Michael Owen fretted about the performances of his beloved racehorses. It’s an example of how Twitter is becoming an ever-more essential tool for being a football fan.

The use of Twitter by footballers has not been without controversy, with players such as Ryan Babel and Carlton Cole falling foul of the FA by posting messages deemed inappropriate by the powers that be. Some fans unfortunately also feel that following a footballer gives them the right to send as much abuse as is possible in 140 characters. And whilst I’m sure many players are tempted to send their own volley of bile back, the best approach seems to be from the likes of Rooney, who merely retweets the most vicious of messages as a way of highlighting the nonsense he has to put up with.

In many ways though, Twitter has become the antidote to the theory that modern footballers have lost touch with the fans; that there are no longer opportunities for supporter and star striker to engage in the way they might have done in days gone by. Thanks to Twitter, fans can now find out their heroes’ views on the weekend’s events, ask them questions - sometimes even getting answers - and find out more about the inner-workings of football clubs with updates on pre-season schedules and pre-match routines.

Far from replacing the face-to-face contact that a fan might have had with players in the 50s and 60s - when it’s romantically claimed you could regularly spot your team’s captain sipping a pint in your local - I believe Twitter has actually brought fans closer to players than they have ever been.

At what many might initially perceive to be uninteresting commentary on people’s lives, even the most mundane of tweets from footballers can offer interesting insights into the lives of the modern player. Take Michael Owen for example; hardly the sport’s most charismatic figure and his Twitter account would struggle to excite even the most easily pleased Manchester United supporter, but his tweets do have an everyman appeal that I find interesting. And ultimately, it’s interesting because despite the huge riches he’s acquired over the years, his life is just as dull as yours and mine.

I’ve read tweets from him about ordering a take-away curry to watch Match of the Day with his wife, heading to the pub on a Sunday afternoon for lunch and finding somewhere with the football on whilst out for a family dinner. Yes, it’s true that none of this information improves our lives in any way, but the fact that all of the above are the very same activities that much of the working population do on a regular basis, helps to show that footballers are not the alien species that we often assume they are.

Joey Barton is another case in point. Known for many years as one of football’s more unsavoury characters, it would be easy to assume that his tweets would offer nothing but an insight into a violent moron’s mindset. Yet in actual fact, Barton often uses Twitter to spark debate on wide ranging subjects from politics to football. He comes across as educated, eloquent and just the right side of opinionated to be interesting and not arrogant. Oh, and he’s a big fan of The Smiths too, which is alright by me.

Naturally with so many footballers now using the site, journalists scrutinise their messages to try and find any information that might help fill up their word count in the desperate days between one season ending and a new one beginning. And this is where my issue with the use of Twitter lies.

In my view, the media is there to tell the stories that the man on the street would otherwise not know. You read the newspaper because journalists investigate, interview and analyse in order to produce content that you in no way could find out yourself. That’s why we read the football gossip pages, because we are eager to find out where certain players might be heading, but have no way of sourcing the information. It’s why we read interviews with the likes of Fernando Torres and John Terry, because you or I will never get the chance to speak to the game’s biggest stars for 30 minutes.

However, over the past year the media - including the sports correspondents - have taken to writing their copy based solely on people’s tweets. So a story on a Premier League player committing to a football club may no longer be obtained as a result of the journalist developing a professional relationship with the player and becoming a trusted confidant; it can now be done merely by looking at a player’s Twitter account - just like you, me or anyone else in the world could do.

Now of course with sponsors wanting their pound of flesh from stars and making media access to them more difficult, journalists have to find other ways to reach the players. And Twitter becoming part of an ever-growing 24 hour news industry also means ‘breaking’ stories becomes more of a challenge than ever before. However, I struggle to see how printing a player’s tweet is news: it isn’t new information, provides no analysis of a situation and merely reproduces words the majority of fans will already have read and since forgotten.

At a time when the media is struggling to work out how to get the most out of print in a digital age, this approach strikes me as lazy, and will do nothing to enhance the fortunes of the media at a time when its stock could hardly be lower. We’ve known for a long time that people get their news from a variety of sources rather than their newspaper, so now is the time for the media to focus on how their content can excite, interest and educate the reader. Reprinting a two day old tweet is certainly not the way forward.