REALITY CHECK

You will have received a letter dated 4 February from Alex Murdoch.  I have read carefully through the points that Alex has made and looking at matters in the cold light of day, things are nowhere near as rosy as he suggests.

1.    Alex Murdoch reports:

“The ETTA has negotiated an award of £9.3 Million from Sport England, which shows their confidence in the progress the ETTA has made.  It will, over the next four years together with other awards, give the ETTA our highest ever budget of £10.8 Million to invest in table tennis within the Community and Grass Roots.”

Whilst Mr Murdoch may be happy with this outcome, if I was in his position I certainly would not be.  It is less than the ETTA asked for and it is much lower than all 3 other racket sports.  Badminton will receive double (£20.8 million), tennis almost 3 times (£26.8 million) and squash in excess of 30% more (£12.6 million).

Badminton, for example, used their extra funding to appoint 40 professional development officers based in counties as well as 9 Regional Development Managers (49 in total) where table tennis has only 9 Regional Development Officers based one per region.  That makes such a difference in helping volunteers to deliver their programmes in their local areas.  Gymnastics, hockey and judo were also amongst the sports that received larger grants than table tennis.

This is the largest 4 year award that we have been offered but I would not be surprised if it is also the smallest amount in percentage terms of the Sport England overall budget for governing body support as the amount available is much bigger.  It is disappointing at best. 

Why are we listed on the Sport England website as just in the development category alongside softball, lacrosse, rounders and volleyball, while sports like badminton, squash, judo, netball and hockey are listed in the priority category?

2.    “UK Sport announced its World Class Funding award of £1.2 M for the GB Table Tennis Programme to the British Table Tennis Federation which, subject to its Board’s approval, will enable the GB National Training Centre (NTC) and its programme for the nominated athletes to continue for a minimum of another two years.”

The UK Sport award of £1.2 million over the next 4 years is much worse and may turn out to be disastrous.  Table tennis was not included in the first round of UK Sport awards when 95% of the £235 million for Olympic sports for the 4 years up to the London Games was announced.  We were only left “in limbo” to share the remaining £12 million along with 8 other sports.  In the second round of announcements, we were allocated a total of £1.2 million for the whole of the next 4 years – only £300,000 per year. 

Of the Olympic sports, we are 25th out of 27 in the grant aid list with only weightlifting and wrestling below us.

UK Sport have said that if we wish we could receive and spend the 4 years allocation in 2 years and the ETTA have decided to gamble in the hope that some extra government money or a generous benefactor comes along to fund years 3 and 4.  What happens if this extra money doesn’t materialise? 

Why, when we knew that the funding for the next 4 year period was less than certain, did we advertise for and appoint 2 new full time overseas coaches on substantial salaries?

Even this £1.2 million taken over 2 years is over £150,000 per annum less than we received for the period up to the Beijing Olympics which concludes on 31 March 2009 and this was not enough.  For example, our talented junior girls have been told that there is no money to send them to any overseas tournaments in the final quarter of this financial year when in the past they have benefited from trips to Sweden and elsewhere.  There has only been one England team overseas trip to the Portuguese Junior since last Summer for these girls.  How do you expect our girls to compete at international level when they have such limited opportunities?

There have also been further cutbacks at the 16+ Academy in Sheffield.  What a mess!

3.    The English Open – Mr Murdoch seems confident that the English Open scheduled for October 2009 will go ahead.  What happened to the English Open scheduled for this season which was due to be held last month?  Why have there been no major events in England since 2002?

The only international championship that has been staged by the ETTA in the last 6 years is the European Junior Top 12 in Sheffield in January which was the wrong event at the wrong time.  The ETTA lost over £30,000.  This is 25% of its annual affiliation fees from our Leagues.

Our players did not live up to expectations because this event was just a couple of weeks after the rule change banning the use of glue for juniors was implemented.  Our team played in the 2007 World Junior Championships at the end of December using their original bats and were required to use bats that produced completely different performances in Sheffield. 
 
From the outset this event was going to be a problem and I did warn about all of this 6 months earlier at a National Council meeting after we were informed that the ETTA had agreed to stage the Junior Top 12.  In my view the value of this event to the ETTA was very small and the loss of £30,000 could not be justified.

4.    Mr Murdoch gives details of the medals won at junior and cadet level in World, Olympic and European events.  Whilst it is encouraging to win junior titles, it is far from the real story.  At senior level we still have no players in the Top 100 in the world.  The players who won most of the medals, and in particular Paul Drinkhall, benefited from quality training in their younger days at the Nottingham Academy which was open between 1997 and 2001.  With the funding cuts referred to above, the chances of our top senior players continuing to progress may well be stifled.

Much worse are the current junior and cadet positions.  In the European Junior Top 10 played in the Netherlands last month, we only had one player of the 40 invited, Gavin Evans, with no cadets and no girls.  If you take a look at the last Euro Mini Cadet results, our results were again disappointing and this is only Europe.  What about competing against the rest of the world?

The lack of adequate and appropriate funded junior and cadet programmes over the last 6 years has taken its toll.  It is true that the funding was reduced by Sport England shortly before Alex Murdoch was elected but nevertheless much more could have been done to help our players compete at international level.  There has not been an academy like Nottingham for our current crop of youngsters whereas most of the top countries have full time academies as standard.

Even by Commonwealth standards we are no longer amongst the best.  There were no medals for England (with the exception of the event for people with a disability) in the 2006 Commonwealth Games in Melbourne and none at the Commonwealth Youth Games in Pune last October.  Our last Games medals were 2 golds plus gold and silver in the disability events in Manchester in 2002.  Although the junior medals have been welcome, the overall position of our national teams is cause for serious concern and more so with the juniors and cadets than the seniors.

5.    Alex Murdoch has listed a series of initiatives.  A number of these are programmes promoted by the Government where Sport England are using the governing bodies of sport to deliver their programmes into the community.  These are not initiatives from the ETTA.

Table tennis has been fortunate to be selected by Sport England to be part of some of these programmes.  In the light of the above, do we feel that Alex Murdoch and his current Management Committee have the ability to maximise the benefits of these programmes and obtain full value for the Sport England investment for our sport?  On the evidence of the last 6 years, clearly not.

This is why I am standing.  I know that I, with my team, can do much better, deliver more value both for Sport England and the ETTA membership and give real benefits to table tennis provided of course that the members give me that chance.


Alan Ransome

10 February 2009


For further information with regard to the election, visit www.alanransome.com