Twenty Christmas gifts that will enrich all our sporting lives in 2019

Here is my Christmas present to sports authorities. Implement all these changes in 2019 and the world will be a better place.

1 Stop allowing the keeper to flop to the ground. Many ways of timewasting in football have been eradicated but this one is on the rise and goes totally unchecked. The goalie of the team in front catches the ball and then, for no reason other than to wind down the clock, falls forward with the ball still clutched to his chest, after which he looks up, slowly rises to his feet and then thinks about distributing it. This needs to be dealt with.

2 Don’t make relay teams carry a baton. The relay should be a test of speed not of how to get a baton from A to B to C to D. It’s the 21st century. Use hi-tech gloves that show when contact between each runner has taken place or something. Otherwise you may as well go the whole hog and turn it into that game you used to play in Cubs where you had to pass the orange down the line without using your hands.

3 Make judges’ scores public after each round. Once again boxing fans, having stayed up until beyond 5am, were left moaning about the injustice of it all when Fury and Wilder were deemed to have drawn their weekend dust-up. The whole scoring system in boxing is ludicrous but if you are going to persevere with the subjective views of three people then at least let the audience know how the bout is progressing at the end of each round.

4 Publish horses’ weights. I still don’t understand why this doesn’t happen. It does in greyhound racing, where a significant drop in a dog’s weight from one race to the next can indicate there has been an attempt to get it ready. It should be the same with horses. It wouldn’t be a failsafe indication that a horse was going to perform better or worse than last time, but, as with wind-ops, headgear and other symbols the value of which is debatable, punters should be given the option of either heeding the information or ignoring it.

5 Stop golfers marking the ball if it is within three feet of the hole. Golf is far too slow and when you watch how the players go about their business it is clear that mostly they are just faffing around for no reason other than because the game’s rulers can’t be arsed to properly police an acceptable rate of play. Bending down to mark a putt that is 1-250 to be holed is a typical example of a pointless act that does nothing but make the game harder to watch.

6 Make the brown a different colour. There is not a lot wrong with snooker but as I get old I realise why old people complain that things are too hard to see. The brown looks too much like the reds and needs to be changed to another colour or even have a stripe around it or some dots.

7 Put the name of the teams on the balls. I see they were still using the same basic equipment that is used to decide the winner of a church fete raffle to sort out the pairings in the FA Cup this week, thus requiring everyone to translate numbers into the allocated teams. There is a better way. Just write the name of each team on a different ball, chuck them in the hat and, hey presto, when they are drawn out we can see straight away which team it is.

8 Don’t make them serve again if it hits the net and goes in. If any other type of tennis shot hits the net and bounces in, play continues. There is no logical reason whatsoever why that should not also apply to serves. I was going to suggest scrapping second serves as well but I’m told by someone who knows the sport better than me that it would mean most games would be won by the receiver.

9 Let teams take free kicks as quickly as they like. It annoys me intensely when teams who have been fouled are themselves penalised by being prevented from taking the resultant free kick as quickly as they want. It is unfair, halts many promising attacks and creates long stoppages that break up the flow of the game. If you foul a team you should have no right to decide when the game restarts, but as things stand you can take as long as you like to painstakingly build a wall. It’s just ridiculous.

10 Scrap the scrum. This is probably the 276th time this column has called for an end to scrums, but still they are allowed to tediously consume as much as 20 per cent of the duration of a rugby match, even though in the vast majority of cases the team with the put-in emerges with possession. Rugby league is better than union for a number of reasons, but their decision a while ago to make scrums non-competitive and therefore both swift and safe is the main one.

11 Situate away fans behind one goal. One of the finest sights in football is the away fans exploding in delight when their team scores. And some grounds make this a familiar occurrence because they put the visiting supporters behind a goal. At others, however, the travelling fans are out of sight and therefore goal celebrations are heard but not seen. All clubs should have to make this change.

12 Circulate the grid positions. There are so many things wrong with F1 that it’s easier to say you might as as well scrap it than try to remedy them all. But the fundamental problem with the sheer monotony of the results is that the sport sets itself up to be dull via the qualification process. The easiest way to alleviate this is to allocate grid slots at the start of each season so that every driver starts a different race in a different position. A more radical solution is to keep the same number of teams (two Ferraris, two Red Bulls, etc) but give each driver a go in each team’s car. This would maintain the necessary interest of the manufacturers but would mean all drivers had a theoretically equal chance of success.

13 Change the qualification for the World Cup and European Championships. Just look at the line-ups for the Euro 2020 groups. The prospect of a 15-month process to play all those boring fixtures just to get to a situation where all the good teams bar maybe one get through and all the minnows get spanked is so dismal. Either squeeze it all into a fortnight at the start of June in each odd-numbered year or have a massive finals which start with a preliminary round for all the low-ranked countries. I’d rather a European Super League than all these colossally dull international breaks.

14 Make it a set of seven. As stated, rugby league is the best form of the game but it would be even better if teams had seven tackles rather than six before relinquishing possession. Six often doesn’t seem enough to create as much action in the exciting areas of the pitch as possible so give seven a go and see what happens.

15 Put cyclists’ names on their handlebars. Even though some cycling commentators could do better when it comes to identifying riders it is a difficult task and viewers suffer as a result of being unable to tell who has shot clear of the peloton, who is chasing down the leader and who is scrapping it out for a stage victory. A simple namecard across the front of the handlebars would solve that. Obviously, the riders would burst into tears at the thought of their precious aerodynamics being affected, but they would all be in the same boat so it wouldn’t matter.

16 Make the ref wear a microphone. I won’t bore you with the argument for this other than to say the ref mic makes rugby union considerably more watchable and football would reap the same benefits. “Oh, but what if the players swear?” Well then they would be fined. And then they would stop swearing.

17 Clamp down on sloppy jump starts. Another no-brainer yet there is no obvious desire to simply instruct starters to declare a false start if the gap between the leader and the last horse as they break into a gallop is too big. And, as with the previous point, if jockeys continued to be slow away they should be fined, which would soon solve things.

18 Speed up one-day cricket. A shot clock isn’t really practical because if you smash one into the crowd it’s bound to cause delays, but something needs to be done to stop the final few overs of each innings going on for ever as skippers and bowlers earnestly discuss whether to move fine leg six inches closer to square or nine.

19 Disqualify golfers who do not shout fore. It is totally unacceptable, and more importantly downright dangerous, for players to fail to alert spectators to the fact a small, hard, circular missile is heading towards them. I was horrified to learn some players apparently keep schtum because if the galleries are standing upright rather than crouching in anticipation there is more chance of the ball rebounding into a favourable position after it has hit them.

20 Let the game continue while injured players are treated.Gary Neville picked up on one of this column’s long-term bugbears at the weekend and spoke a lot of sense when explaining why referees should let play carry on while the physio comes on, with the option to halt the action if it gets too close to them. This would create fluency and eradicate the need for players to pretend they are hurt in order to waste time. This really does need to happen as soon as possible.

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