Board's own goal can still be scrubbed out

AS PROUD a Guernseyman as I am, I despair sometimes over the short-sightedness of my fellow islanders who see change as something imparted by the devil.

Guernsey FC is here for one reason and no other: to take island football to levels never previously dreamt of.

And what a fantastic start it has made.

The Green Lions are flying at the top of the Combined Counties League, promotion looks a nigh-on certainty and hundreds of new football supporters are flocking to Footes Lane to follow their heroes.

Football, as a sport, has captured the island public's imagination.

Yet, some people in the game and, quite bizarrely, its ruling body, the Guernsey Football Association, are wearing faces as long as a Rugby World Cup tournament.

It's incredible.

For the first time in more than a century of Channel Islands football, Guernsey has stolen a march on its biggest rivals, Jersey, and a small section of the island football community are unhappy.

Surely, the board of the GFA can see that?

It beggars belief that the GFA board could have scored such a hideous own goal as the one they engineered last week when, in effect, they laid down an ultimatum to the best players in the island: Play for us on Muratti semi-final day or you get banned.

So needless, so stupid.

The GFA have panicked all because we lost a match to the Devon and Exeter League with a side weakened by GFC commitments and an unusually long injury list.

Sure, the board have been getting it in the ears from jealousy-fuelled domestic club members, but they should be big enough to realise that you can't always have everything.

To lose at the first hurdle of a competition won so gloriously a year earlier, was disappointing, but it should have been viewed as part of the bigger picture.

And what is that bigger picture?

Well, in my book, it is not solely the outcome of the Muratti.

Winning a Muratti above everything else is not taking the sport forward, which the presence of Guernsey FC on the national UK pyramid quite obviously is.

None of this latest fuss need have happened.

Quite apart from the GFA's clumsy handling of an admittedly delicate situation, the Inter-Insular Committee, which comprises representatives of the Guernsey, Alderney and Jersey FAs, could have taken into account Guernsey FC's new commitment. They did not on this occasion but for the good of the game in the Channel Islands might I suggest that they do so in future.

Indeed, of all the many Your Shout and Facebook comments which have appeared in the past 48 hours, the one I like most came from a woman called Emma, who wrote: 'Do you want me to phone up Alderney and ask if they can play another day?'

Of course, the most sensible thing to happen would be that the Muratti semi is moved to accommodate Guernsey FC.

In imposing this new rule the GFA clearly did not think this one through.

Yes, the Muratti is a top game in which all Guernsey footballers wish to play in, but one game is not as big as a whole nine-month campaign.

My message to the board is simple: Admit your mistake and give GFC your full backing as it will take you the farthest in the long run.