The problem is these people are unaccountable. Sport's chiefs need to spend a day as a fan to see how their poor leadership is causing damage Their events are successful despite them, not because of them. They schedule fixtures for television and expect you all to provide the colourful backdrop regardless. And nobody in authority cares about any of this. There were once again deaths at the Africa Cup of Nations in Cameroon earlier this year the Sir Vivian Richards Stadium in Antigua where England toured last winter is built miles from the nearest centre with no public transport bar taxis. The paying public were treated with contempt at Lord's yesterday, too, and many of them missed the eventful start of the first Test against New Zealand. It's really no surprise, then, that the French Tennis Federation chief executive, who departed on the eve of the tournament and presumably left no plan for how late-night tennis was to work for its paying customers, was Amelie Oudea-Castera, the new sports minister, who has spent the past week propping up police and UEFA lies about what unfolded at the Stade de France last Saturday.īut this is not just about France, or tennis or football. We do not have the means to organise this for 15,000 people yet.
'If we continue with these night sessions, people need to make sure they have a way back home. 'We haven't planned anything yet, but obviously we need to organise ourselves differently. 'I'm learning a lot of things regarding the scheduling of the tournament,' she said. It was not Mauresmo who agreed a package with Amazon Prime that involved starting a main match at 8.45pm local time - but she was in situ when it should have been discussed how that might affect people once the trains stopped running. Even so, the absence of understanding of what it is like to be a paying customer displayed the following day was astonishing.Īt the French Open, one of the directors, Amelie Mauresmo was unaffected by the travel chaos that affected the 15,000 who stayed beyond the last metro for Novak Djokovic vs Rafa Nadal She would have had a tournament car, or her own, parked on site and waiting. Mauresmo, though, would have been unaffected. Others were left to walk for hours, or wait for ages. True, there was no threat of death by misadventure as there had been outside the Stade de France - the 16th arrondissement is very different from St Denis - but one fan reported being asked £81 for a journey of little more than a mile. But let's move on, for within four days, Amelie Mauresmo was explaining another organisational catastrophe in the French capital.Īs director of the French Open tennis tournament, she was trying to justify how the match of the competition so far - Rafa Nadal versus Novak Djokovic - had been allowed to conclude at 1.15am, more than an hour after the last Metro had stopped running, with no way for the majority of the 15,000 crowd to get home. There was always a chance Russia's host status would become unacceptable. So if UEFA and Paris only had three months to plan, that's on UEFA and Ceferin, because they gave the match to Vladimir Putin's favourite city, St Petersburg.
It went rogue in sporting terms decades before. Ceferin thinks he can fool us, but Russia didn't become a rogue nation overnight, when it invaded Ukraine.
He wanted sympathy for not being able to organise a football match at less than a year's notice.Īnd why was there merely a three-month lead time for the 2022 edition of the Champions League final? Because UEFA had initially seen fit to award the match to Russia - a nation that corrupted sport with its systemic drug-taking regime. The callous absence of concern for the ordinary fans, the despicable self-regard, the selfishness.Ĭeferin thought it disrespectful that he should be asked to help those being attacked and injured outside the stadium. The monstrous arrogance of the breed running sport.
Ceferin said the conversation was over.'Īnd there it is, laid bare. He said they killed themselves just to get this game on. 'He said, "You don't know how difficult this has been to organise in just a few months". 'He didn't want to listen to what I had to say,' Rotheram explained. When Mayor of Liverpool Steve Rotheram (not pictured) approached UEFA president Aleksander Ceferin (middle) to discuss the issues, Ceferin thought it to be disrespectful
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