Scottish Curling, brought to you by "British Curling"

I have quite an impressive track record of getting myself in the Daily Express (complete with irate quotes from the Scottish Conservative Party!) when I post about curling, so as Scotland won the World Championships overnight, I thought it might be a good moment to have another go, and dig out some photos from my trip to the Scottish Championships in Dumfries two months ago when I got to see Team Mouat in action.  Of course they didn't actually win that week, and if the traditional system had applied, that would have meant they wouldn't have even represented Scotland at the worlds.   That long-standing tradition was scrapped relatively recently and replaced with a selection panel.  I get the impression from listening to other people milling around in Dumfries both last year and this year that most of the curling fraternity fully expected the panel to still take very strong account of the results of the Scottish Championships, but it's absolutely clear they're not doing that at all - Team Henderson and Team Whyte have won the women's and men's Scottish titles respectively for two straight years but on both occasions they've been passed over.

Of course any new and controversial selection policy lives and dies by its results, and now that Team Mouat have won for Scotland, nobody will be complaining.   But for better or worse, one effect the new system undoubtedly has is to downgrade the prestige of the Scottish Championships, which is in danger of starting to look like no more than a warm-up competition.

Regular readers may recall that I got a sort of 'exclusive' at last year's Scottish Championships because I was sitting within earshot of a Scottish Curling bigwig who was speaking very loudly about the controversy over the BBC's last-minute decision not to livestream the competition - he revealed that BBC Scotland had been perfectly happy to go ahead, but that in the finest traditions of the British state broadcaster, they had been overruled by their masters in Salford.  This year, amazingly, I found myself sitting in similarly close proximity to a bigwig from "British Curling", and I wondered if I might get another exclusive, but alas he was speaking more softly.  I did pick him up saying that "grown-up decisions will have to be made starting in April", which I presume was a reference to Olympic selection, but I doubt if there's any earth-shattering revelation in that.

But given that the British Olympic Association seemingly put totally inappropriate pressure on Scottish Curling to allow "British Curling" to form the selection panel that chooses Scottish teams for the World and European Championships, and given that Scottish Curling inappropriately agreed to that demand (presumably they felt they had no choice for funding reasons), it did leap out at me that this particular British Curling bigwig had a strong south-of-England accent and that during hours of sitting watching the Scottish Championships he repeatedly used the words "British" and "UK" but only used the word "Scotland" once - and that was within the context of "BBC Sport Scotland".  I looked him up online when I got home, and his biography describes him as having a "strong connection to all three nations of the mainland United Kingdom".  Who actually talks like that?  What in the name of heavens is "the mainland United Kingdom"?  Does it mean the island of Great Britain?  It reminds me of the Newspeak language used at Conservative Party conferences in the 1990s when delegates from Buckinghamshire used to queue up to denounce devolution by saying "My father fought in the Scots Guards and my great-grandmother was once rumoured to have been on holiday in Monmouth and thanks to Labour's devolution policy I am TOTALLY CONFUSED ABOUT WHO I AM!  We're all one glorious mixed-up UNITED KINGDOM PEOPLE, surely?"

Actually he seemed like a nice enough chap, but it should be an absolutely unbreakable principle that the selection of the Scottish national teams in any sport is done by the relevant Scottish governing body, not contracted out under pressure to some sort of supranational body.  The English FA would never agree to hand over selection of the England manager and team to UEFA, or to a Frankenstein "UK Football" body.

The Olympics are next year, so if Steve Cram is commentating for the BBC again, brace yourself for him to make endless claims that "this Great Britain team are the reigning world champions" without any clarification that the team was actually representing Scotland when they won the World Championships.