14/11/2008

Football is so big in Scotland, it so over-powers every other sport, that it’s rare to find a journalist working in sports coverage who can truly be called a sports writer – most practitioners these days are football writers.
 
Football, below the SPL might be mince, but it doesn’t really get the coverage it perhaps deserves; for all the column inches they get outwith their local papers, the teams in the Highland, East of Scotland and South of Scotland leagues, plus the Junior clubs, might as well not exist.
 
The over-hyping of the English Premiership has seen a sea change in the coverage of football up here, with even wholly-Scottish papers such as the Daily Record and Sunday Mail, Herald and Sunday Herald and Scotsman and Scotland on Sunday giving Manchester United, Chelsea, Arsenal and Liverpool greater coverage than they give the lesser Scottish sides such as St Johnstone, Raith Rovers and Pollok.
 
This margin-to-margin football coverage has squeezed the room available to the vast body of Scottish sport, in general. Our few non-football big names: - such as Andy Murray, Chris Hoy, and Colin Montgomerie - are well-covered, but if you want to read about other top-class Scottish players and teams in the 'minority' sports – you’d better have good eyesight or a magnifying glass, because you’ll need to look in the 'digest' pages of our newspapers, below such 'mega-interest sports' (to the Scottish public) as NBA basketball, Major League baseball, NHL ice hockey and the NFL’s American Football.
 
If our national newspapers bumped up their coverage of Scottish basketball, ice hockey, hockey, volleyball and other sports which are largely ignored, I'm convinced they’d sell more.
 
It would also make life easier for some of the sports writers whom I really admire – the Scottish single sport specialists, who toil ceaselessly to get their sports featured. Writers like Nigel Duncan, who covers Scottish ice hockey; Mike Stanger, who covers hockey; Sandy Sutherland - athletics and basketball; and Anne Dunwoodie, who took on coverage of bowling after the death of her husband, Gordon.
 
The football fanatics in our trade look down on these lesser sports, often wrongly.

I can guarantee you more action in one period of say a Paisley Pirates v Fife Flyers ice hockey match than in half a season of Old Firm clashes.

Kelburne v Western at hockey is another encounter to which you wouldn’t send your paper’s faint-hearted, while, just ask Graham Spiers of The Times. He didn’t believe the things I told him about Auchinleck Talbot v Cumnock, until the day I persuaded him to cover one encounter, whereupon he told me I’d undersold the passion of  the rivalry.
 
In earning my war correspondent’s stripes by covering Talbot v Cumnock, I’ve seen some violent clashes; I played for Cumnock Rugby Club’s 'Mean Machine' (motto: “Well we won the fight”), but I’ve never seen violence to compare with Pirates v Flyers at ice hockey. Here is THE sport which was made for Scotland (hardly surprising since ice hockey’s origins supposedly go back to an inter-clan shinty match, on the frozen St Lawrence River, after the Battle of Quebec, with a severed Frenchman’s head as the 'ball'.
 
It’s fast, violent, full of skill, but played indoors - perfect for our climate.
 
We should all occasionally get out of our football press boxes and into the real sports world - it would open a few eyes to the fact, in Scotland, there is life beyond fitba.

Matt Vallance is a freelance sports writer

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