Compiled by PHILIP REID

Here's hoping for Kauto Star

HERE'S hoping Kauto Star gets the thumbs-up from all concerned to carry Ruby Walsh in next week's Cheltenham Gold Cup.

Kauto Star epitomises all that is good about the National Hunt game, his two Gold Cup wins at Cheltenham being matched by a couple of jumping blunders.

The horse’s connections are, of course, right to insist that he will only race if he has recovered from the training fall he took last week.

But the festival wouldn’t be the same without him.

Not everyone can be a McIlroy or Messi

THE OTHER day something caught my attention. The poster, in a chipper of all places, was eye-catching. Not so much for its graphics, but for what it offered: soccer coaching for – wait for it – 18-month-olds to five-year-olds!

I’m sure the coaching is fun and orchestrated, as much as it can be for that age, but the notion of children (some still in nappies?) learning how to dribble a ball almost as soon as they can walk seems to be one designed to appeal to parents with stars in their eyes as much as to the kids. What’s wrong with the local green?

Of course, this past week, a great one for sport – with Rory McIlroy’s elevation to golf’s number one and the sheer wizardry of Lionel Messi confirming his status as the greatest footballer on the planet and one of the best ever – will have given some encouragement to those parents who believe you should introduce your child to a chosen sport as early as humanly feasible.

After all, McIlroy, like Tiger Woods, was a mere toddler when he first started to swing a golf club.

As for Messi? The Argentine whiz-kid was playing organised football for a club called Grandoli – where he was coached by his father – as a five-year-old and was inducted into a youth academy (that of Newell’s Old Boys) by the time he was eight.

The discovery a couple of years later that he was suffering from a growth deficiency brought about the connection with Barcelona, who offered to pay for his medical treatment. And we saw the other night exactly where that marriage has brought player and club.

Like prodigies in other disciplines, be it music or dance, McIlroy and Messi were probably destined for greatness in their chosen fields and the parental influences, in their respective cases, were very obviously for the better. Both may have the world at their feet, but both also have their feet firmly planted on terra firma.

Indeed, there’s a couple of videos worth catching on YouTube of the two in their pre-teens: in McIlroy’s case, he is a nine-year-old on the Gerry Kelly television show on UTV controlling balls with the head of a wedge and also chipping balls into a washing machine having returned to Belfast from Doral as the world junior champion; in Messi’s, he is a 10-year-old weaving past defenders and leaving them on the ground in his wake. In one instance, Messi is cut down by a sliding tackle and simply dusts himself off and jumps up again.

In McIlroy’s video chat with Kelly, he is sure – even at that young age – that he wants to be a professional golfer and tells the TV host that he spends his evenings chipping “air balls” into his mother’s washing machine.

So, who are we to say it is wrong to introduce your offspring to a sport at a very young age? After all, Woods was on national television in the US as a two-year-old by which stage his father Earl had him down as the next-great-thing in the game (he was right!); Andre Agassi was also hitting tennis balls at his father’s insistence at the age of two. In his book Open, he recalled running around with a racket taped to his hand and sleeping with a tennis ball over his head.

The difference with McIlroy and Messi is that they love what the do.

Agassi hated it. Of playing the game professional, Agassi wrote: “I play tennis for a living even though I hate tennis, hate it with a dark and secret passion and always have.”

Agassi’s case is the extreme one, and the sugary tales of McIlroy and Messi in their respective marches to the top are clearly the ones that are more appealing. Certainly to parents who enlist their children in football camps when their ages are measured in months rather than years.

It is worth noting, however, that international opinion on the matter is that children should sample as many sports as possible in their formative years rather than be confined to one. In their paper of 2007 – “The Developmental Model of Sport Participation” – Jean Coté and Jessica Fraser-Thomas, academics at Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada, outlined different pathways of involvement in sport which proposed five scenarios regarding the role that sampling a number of sports and “deliberate play” can have as opposed to “specialisation and deliberate practice” in promoting continued participation and elite performance in sport.

Is there a right way, or a wrong way? Different sportsmen and women have reached the top through different routes. Ernie Els, for instance, was as good at tennis and rugby in his teenage years as he was at golf before concentrating on his chosen sport. Lee Westwood was an accomplished cricketer before only taking up golf in his teenage years.

So, for every McIlroy or Messi, you have a flip side.

It is the way of sporting life.

The truly great ones always find a way to get there.

Apoel are inspirational 

ONE of the more inspirational stories of the football season so far has been the achievement of Apoel Nicosia in reaching the quarter-finals of the Champions League.

There’s some special feel-good factor about being a couch-potato neutral and cheering on the underdog. When you consider the mighty men of Manchester – the blue and red sides – failed to even make the knock-out stages, the onward and upward rise of the Cypriots is all the more worthy.

And is there any hope that whatever a team from Cyprus can do, so too can one from the League of Ireland?

Okay, so the annual budget of Apoel – estimated at €10 million, but set to soar after making the quarter-finals – is still substantially more than any League of Ireland club currently has to play with.

But the Cypriot club was struggling with debt issues as recently as 2009 when it made the Champions League group stages for the first time. It hasn’t looked back since, the injection of capital then allowing it to pay off any money it owed and to invest in players.

Still, the €1 million splashed out on the Brazilian Ailton is the highest transfer fee it has paid and shows shrewd business acumen.

The closest comparison we have in this country to Apoel is, of course, Shamrock Rovers. This year’s run in the Europa League – reaching the group stages to bring the likes of Tottenham Hotspurs to town – can only have whet the Tallaght club’s appetite for a bigger slice of European action and they still look the Irish club most likely to make such inroads.

However, the attendance figures from the first round of matches last weekend indicate that serious work still needs to be done to get bums on seats at Premier Division matches.

The 3,500 spectators who paid through the stiles at the Brandywell for Derry City’s game with Bohs was more than twice the number that attended the next-highest crowd, the 1,718 at the Shels-Sligo Rovers game.

The average attendance for the six Premier matches of the new season was 1,708.

They deserve better.

Cats need to look up their city cousins

MAYBE the time has finally come for the Kilkenny County Board to put their hands up and admit they have utterly failed in their duty to football . . . . and to use the GAA’s version of the “Granny Rule” to field a team of footballing cats?

Kilkenny’s massive 46-point drubbing at the hands of Fermanagh in Division Four of the Allianz Football League – coming on the back of the even larger defeat to Louth in the Leinster under-21 football championship – speaks volumes for the woeful state of the game in the hurling-mad county.

But surely there are enough sons of Cats in the big smokes of Dublin and Cork who are just below the level needed to make their own county teams who could bring some football nuance to the cause and allow them to fulfil dreams of playing intercounty with Kilkenny?

Just a thought.

Applications on postcards to Kilkenny County Board, Nowlan Park, Kilkenny City.

British athletes' non-handshake advice not in spirit of Games

A WHOLE host of things have been organised to make the London 2012 Olympics a friendly sort of deal: floating operas inspired by the poem The Owl and the Pussy Cat; street gigs, and secret pop-up performances aimed set to transform some of the city's iconic landmarks all make for much revelry for fans while the serious business takes place on the track, in the ring, in the pool and elsewhere.

As far as the athletes are concerned, the welcome will be less hospitable.

The 550-or so athletes that will make up the Britain team have been told not to shake hands with rival athletes or with visiting dignitaries for fear of catching germs.

The home athletes have been told strong personal hygiene could prove the difference between success and failure.

Dr Ian McCurdie, the British team’s top medical man, made the point that the Olympic village could be a “pretty hostile one” for infections.

“The greatest threat to performance is illness and possibly injury,” he said, in defending the handshake ban in “minimising risk of illness and optimising resistance”.

No such ban will be imposed on the United States team, with their spokesman claiming that their athletes will “embrace the Olympic spirit and meet, greet and interact with as many athletes from as many nationalities as possible”.

Handshakes or not, it will be pretty hard to avoid interaction.

The Olympic village consists of 2,818 apartments which will cater for 16,000 athletes and officials from more than 200 countries.

After the Olympic Games, the village will then be turned into a mixture of part-affordable and part-private housing community to be known as East Village.