One tractor in need of a jump-start to top

EVERY July, Christophe Bassons would line up for Stage One of the Tour de France knowing he had no chance of ever wearing the yellow jersey.

Not because he was a domestique, the unheralded grinders who sacrifice themselves to help the star of the show. But because he played fair.

In a sport more drug-addled than Ozzy Osbourne’s tour bus, the French rider steadfastly refused to ‘load the cannon’ – a slang term for the use of banned stimulant EPO.

By 1998, he was the only member of his team, Festina, who wasn’t injecting. When frustration boiled over and he spoke out, Bassons was ridiculed and rejected, scorned by race organisers and the peloton – for trying to do things properly.

“For three years, I’ve been the second speed,” said Bassons, shortly before quitting. “They have ruined three years of my life as a racer.”

For any sportsman, little is more demoralising than playing straight in a crooked game. Just ask any Championship club trying to run a tight ship.

A club, for instance, like Ipswich. This week, marked ten years since owner Marcus Evans rescued the club from oblivion.

It has been a decade of stasis and stagnation, of mounting apathy. Only once in his reign have the Tractor Boys come remotely close to ending their 16-year absence from the top flight. Much of that time has been spent keeping League One at arm’s length.

Cautious

But, with the exception of some dubious ticket pricing, you would be hard-pushed to find any serious complaints among Ipswich fans.

Because Evans hasn’t been neglectful, nor used the club as a cash cow. The 54-year-old has parted with £100m of his own money just to keep Ipswich running, none of which he is likely to see again.

He has simply been cautious. Since the end of Roy Keane’s illfated and expensive reign, the purse strings at Portman Road have been tighter than a duck’s derriere on a water slide.

No big wages. No big signings. Resources funnelled not into the pockets of agents but into coaches at the academy.

Once, that was enough. But when half your rivals are drugged up to the eyeballs on Asian billions or parachute payments, sense and sustainability don’t really cut the mustard.

Demands

Yes, underdogs do triumph. Leicester won the Premier League. Foinavon won the Grand National.

But, in the Championship, success invariably demands an element of financial excess. Take last year’s ‘fairytale’ in West Yorkshire. Huddersfield’s unexpected promotion to the Premier League owed much to the vision of chairman Dean Hoyle and the skill of manager David Wagner. Yet the Terriers, for all their modest income, still spent an eye-watering 128 per cent of their turnover on wages. Bournemouth, another vaunted minnow, cranked that figure up to a mind-boggling 237 per cent when they won the title under Eddie Howe in 2016. Did those clubs do anything wrong? Not really. They wanted promotion and took the only possible course of action that would allow them to battle the division’s big-hitters. Just like a Tour de France rider, knowing that a rival is doped, knows his only chance lies in cracking open a vial of his own. When rules and ethics fail to level a playing field, the rules of the jungle dictate. The biggest, most ruthless beasts take the spoils. And clubs like Ipswich? They get eaten, left to rot. Which is why, without the EPO shot of a big-money takeover, the Tractor Boys seem destined to remain, like Bassons, stuck at the back of the peloton, pedalling like crazy but going nowhere.