Comment: The cost of commitment

SO Manchester will be 'representing England' in the contest to hold the Commonwealth Games of the year 2002, clear winners over clogged and crippled London. 'Manchester Triumphant', we were told in last week's headlines. And 'Manchester Celebrates'. Well, maybe.

No reasonable sports fan would wish to withhold congratulations from Sir Bob Scott's team for their indomitable commitment to sport and to their city. But are the people of Manchester in fact entitled to celebrate anything this weekend other than the possibility of another hangover along the lines of that suffered after their failure to win the Olympic Games franchise?

The 'race' to land the world's major tournaments is now a kind of sporting event in itself: synchronised tendering, with points for technical merit (stadiums, transportation, Ceausescu-style concrete blocks available for metamorphosis into an 'athletes' village') and artistic impression (five-star hotels, shopping and Pavarotti for the administrators and their spouses). On this basis, cities lay bare their culture and their 'infrastructure' for inspection in an atmosphere seething with marketing jargon and grey propaganda.

For Manchester, the ostensible difference this time is that there are, so far, no declared rivals. It may even stay that way. But since the final decision is not be announced until the closing weeks of 1995, it is hard to believe that a challenge will not by then have arisen from some emerging location anxious to raise its profile, brandishing a sunshine guarantee and the promise of an untapped market. To lose even this consolation prize would be a further blow for the home town of Manchester United and Michael Atherton.

More seriously, even those who measure life only by the stop-watch or the scoreboard might consider a bigger question. If the point is to help regenerate a city still in the throes of post-industrial trauma, is this quite the right way to be going about such a serious task?

In the modern world, where most things are judged by the way they play on television, sport often finds itself being used as the engine of this kind of urban renewal. Games involving young people in abbreviated costumes are, after all, much more telegenic than, say, a project to re-establish the manufacture of ball bearings, to provide more computers or games teachers for state schools, to replace decaying Victorian hospitals or to build new tramways and monorails. But, except for those professionally involved, sport is not an alternative to industry or education or public health or a decent rapid-transit system. In a sensible society, first-class sports facilities would be the by-product of prosperity, not the generator of it. By all means let Manchester have pounds 72m of public money for its Millennium Stadium, but not until society's more pressing needs have been satisfied.