England players may escape monitoring as anti-doping talks hit deadlock

Fabio Capello's players look ever more likely to escape being monitored by anti-doping enforcers before the World Cup. Discussions between the Football Association and the national anti-doping authorities over an elite-player testing pool have been under way for more than a year and there was initial success: both sides reported last July that they had reached agreement on a broad outline of what such a body would look like. But now the two sides look further apart than ever over how many and which England players will be tested: the only thing they shared yesterday was an unwillingness to discuss the proposals. There is a deadlock in negotiations given the new UK Anti-Doping agency, which was set up in December, now answers directly to the World Anti-Doping Agency, while the FA is mindful how England players reacted with threatened industrial action over Rio Ferdinand's eight-month ban for a missed test. There is no such difficulty at the Rugby Football League, which has had a similar system in place since last May. It has 17 international squad players in the National Registered Testing Pool, who must give notice of their whereabouts for an hour a day, seven days a week. It was from that pool that Terry Newton became the first athlete to test positive for human growth hormone use. Eccles faces FA fight The Football Association yesterday appointed Julian Eccles as its director of communications. Eccles, who performed the same role at Sky and Ofcom, will be tasked with avoiding the sort of public relations disaster that was the FA's response to the government's seven questions on football governance. But at the moment it looks as if Eccles will be fighting with one hand tied behind his back. Although the FA's own strategy document Vision 2008-12 recognised a need to monitor structural changes arising out of the Burns review (which proposed changes to the way the FA governs itself), very little has been done. The document called for "a proper review during the term of the strategy of all the aspects of the changes whether at council, board or Football Regulatory Authority level". Now, halfway through the four-year term, the chief executive, Ian Watmore, has reported back to the council on the early findings of his FRA review. He told a council meeting on Wednesday he wants to cut back on transfer market red tape and will come up with proposals in May. That is the easy bit. Meanwhile no one grasps the nettle still over how to tackle the 19th-century council and board structures that Lord Burns tried in vain to reform. Ivory Coast guards The Ivory Coast professional club ASEC Mimosas, whose academy produced the Premier League stars Emmanuel Eboué, Salomon Kalou and Kolo Touré, have sought assistance from a European research institute to prevent their players leaving Abidjan too early. The Professional Football Players' Observatory has linked up with the Ivorian club to provide advice. A statement said: "The idea is to create conditions for players to leave not only to clubs who are best placed to develop them but also at the right time, once they have acquired top-level experience in the ASEC first team." Which is all a far cry from when they were selling first‑dibs rights to a network of European clubs that included Charlton Athletic. Couch potato land A House of Commons research paper last month examined what effect hosting the 2012 Olympics will have on sports participation and remarked: "Most studies have concluded that no host country has yet experienced a lasting increase in sports participation." Now even some of Sport England's own figures are starting to demonstrate it. On Wednesday Sport England released the results of its Active People Survey, which reflects the value it gives for its £258m annual budget. The figures, from January 2009 to January 2010, show that 24.07m people were not taking part in any moderate-intensity sport at all. The figures for the 12 months from October 2005, starting three months after the Olympics were awarded to London, showed only 23.927m were that inactive – the increase equivalent to everyone in Telford taking to the settee. Sport England says that is because the population has grown. At least in two years the couch potatoes will have some nice stadiums to watch on telly.