I am thinking, of course, of the wrangling over the eventual composition of the squads that will represent Team GB in the Olympic football competition at London 2012.

 

This was in the news again last week, as Gerry Sutcliffe, the UK Sports Minister, told the House of Commons that Britain could field a 2012 team composed entirely of English players.

 

I have little to add on this particular debate – other than to state that it would be a crying shame if the fears of the football associations of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland regarding their independence and voting rights within world governing body FIFA deprived fans of a one-off chance to watch the best British players teaming up together for a marquee occasion.

 

What I do wonder, with the number of ‘traditional’ British sports in the summer Games likely to increase over the next decade or two, is whether football’s present difficulties might spill over into new areas.

 

Take rugby.

 

While the International Olympic Committee is particularly hard to read when it comes to the Olympic sporting programme, I happen to believe that rugby sevens stands a good chance of getting into the 2016 Games when a decision is taken this October.

 

This raises the question of whether the various national rugby governing bodies would consent to their best players joining a British Olympic rugby sevens squad.

 

[With the Welsh men having this month won the sevens World Cup in Dubai all by themselves, it could be an awesomely powerful squad, but that’s by the by.]

 

Multinationalism is embedded in British rugby union, in a way that it is not in football, in the shape of the British & Irish Lions touring tradition.

 

So there seems a very good chance that rugby would avoid football’s difficulties.

 

 

Certainly, the Welsh Rugby Union exuded enthusiasm about the idea when I approached them, with chairman David Pickering saying: “We would be delighted to be part of a GB Sevens team competing at the 2016 Olympics.”

 

And Wales Sevens captain Lee Beach said it would be “an enormous honour to be part of a GB team at the Olympic Games.

 

“I have represented Wales in Sevens at the Commonwealth Games, but to represent Great Britain at the Olympics would be the stuff of dreams.

 

“Playing for the British & Irish Lions is the top of the ladder for the fifteen-a-side game and the Olympics would be the pinnacle of the Sevens game.”

 

The parallel with the Lions, though, is of course not exact.

 

Ireland would no doubt field their own team at the Olympics – and this could, it seems to me, raise its own extremely delicate political issues.

 

The Irish rugby team has traditionally included players from Ulster.

 

David Humphreys, a much-capped fly-half, was born in Belfast; Willie John McBride, an absolute giant of the Irish game, was born in Toomebridge, County Antrim.

 

Though I am not aware that this is normally the cause of any tension whatsoever, I can’t help wondering how some of the more reactionary voices in Northern Ireland politics might respond if Northern Ireland-born rugby players took part in the pageantry of an Olympic Games opening ceremony while following the green white and orange Irish tricolour flag.

 

 

Cricket is another traditional British sport that I expect, in time, to return to the Olympics, since, with the decline of the once all-conquering Indian field hockey team, how else can the Olympic Movement ever hope to really gain purchase in the world’s second most populous country?

 

 [This cannot happen, however, until 2020 at the earliest.]

 

Here, I think, the most interesting political questions relate to the Caribbean.

 

Imagine, in an Olympic cricket tournament, the currently resurgent West Indies team would presumably be divided every which way among Barbados, Guyana, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Antigua and Barbuda, Grenada, St Kitts and Nevis, St Vincent and the Grenadines and who knows what other national entities.

 

Returning to football, it is fascinating to reflect on whether Trinidad and Tobago’s Jack Warner, one of the most powerful figures within FIFA, would have risen to a position of such influence had the sport, like cricket, really taken root in the region in the colonial era and spawned a West Indies football team.

 

 

● As I write this, I see that FINA, world swimming’s governing body, has just produced a so-called “Dubai Charter” on requirements for swimwear approval.

 

As I suspected, [insidethegames.com December 29, 2008], FINA looks to be treading cautiously.

 

To my [admittedly non-expert] eyes, there seems to be little in the four-page document of a nature to trigger precipitate change.

 

On one issue at least, the Charter is admirably clear: “The swimmer can only wear one swimsuit.”

 

Disappointing as it may be that this should need to be spelt out, at least now the deed is done.

 

David Owen is a specialist sports journalist who worked for 20 years for the Financial Times in the United States, Canada, France and the UK. He ended his FT career as sports editor after the 2006 World Cup and is now freelancing, including covering last year's Beijing Olympics