Making PE a core subject in schools and removing unnecessary ‘no ball games’ signs are among the recommendations in a new report looking at barriers to sport and physical activity in England.

The Culture, Media and Sport Committee report highlights “persistent financial pressure, limited facilities, a lack of prioritisation in the school curriculum, and an absence of national co-ordination that prevents the system from operating effectively”.

It calls for a cross-government strategy to deliver a healthier nation, and an increase in funding to boost participation in local communities.

The MPs want spending on sport and recreation to go from the current 0.3% of total government expenditure to at least 0.6% over the next 10 years, claiming that “funding for school and community sport is insufficient and increasingly unstable”.

They also recommend that PE is granted the same status as English, mathematics and science in schools.

Their Game On report, external also calls for women’s football to be exempt from the long-standing restrictions on broadcasting the sport on Saturday afternoons, saying it was “key to inspiring activity” and that ministers should “intervene in discussions” between the football authorities.

In England and Scotland, no matches are currently shown during the ‘3pm blackout’ slot – 2.45pm-5:15pm – to encourage attendance at games.

“Evidence shows that when women’s sport is regularly broadcast, especially on free‑to‑air TV, girls are more likely to feel inspired and motivated to be active,” the report claims.

“A dedicated broadcast slot for women’s football would provide consistent coverage, grow audiences and challenge persistent gender stereotypes.”

Committee chair Dame Caroline Dinenage MP said: “We’re a country of sport lovers when it comes to supporting our stars at home and abroad, but there are too many barriers stopping people from getting up and giving it a go themselves at school and clubs in our communities.

“What we need is a national shift in the way we think about sport and a commitment at all levels to deliver a healthy and more active nation.

“Boosting the visibility of strong role models for girls is also key to inspiring activity, so giving women’s football a prime Saturday afternoon TV slot could have a transformative effect.”

Emily Robinson, chief executive of charity London Sport, which has campaigned for the removal of ‘no ball games’ signs in public spaces, said the report is “a significant and timely intervention at a critical moment for community sport and physical activity”.

Robinson added: “We are particularly pleased to see recognition of the importance of unlocking the spaces around us – including support for our ‘More Ball Games’ campaign – which shows how small, practical changes can remove barriers and open up opportunities for children and young people to be active.”

London Sport claims 560,000 Londoners are put off by the signs, and that each one removed could make up to 80 children more active.

Following a year-long inquiry, the MPs’ report concludes that despite strong demand, committed volunteers, and many successful local initiatives, sport and physical activity “remain under-recognised within national health policy, and that a statutory duty must be placed on local authorities to provide sporting and leisure facilities in their communities”.

It also says: “PE and daily movement are not being fully utilised in schools, leaving too many children, particularly the least active, without the health, wellbeing and learning benefits that regular activity provides.”

The MPs are calling for a minimum of two hours of high-quality PE each week to be mandatory.

“Curriculum time for PE has declined, its non‑core status has reduced its perceived value, and inequalities in participation have widened as a result,” the report states. “Making PE a core subject would raise its status and help ensure that physical activity is integrated across teaching and learning, rather than squeezed from the timetable.”

The MPs make the case that investing in sport “delivers social and economic benefits that will lead to significant savings” in health and welfare budgets, while further recommendations include introducing greater planning protections for playing fields and sporting facilities.

The report says the MPs are “concerned” that the government is considering stripping funding agency Sport England of its statutory right to be consulted before a playing field is built on.

The Department of Culture, Media and Sport has been approached for comment. Last year it said that a minimum of £400m would be invested into new and upgraded grassroots sports facilities “that promote health, wellbeing and community cohesion”, and that almost 1,000 community projects across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland were set to benefit.

LIV Golf Mexico City, final round

-21 J Rahm (Spa); -15 D Puig (Spa); -14 J Ballester (Spa); -12 S Vincent (Zim)

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Jon Rahm clinched the LIV Golf Mexico City title on Sunday amid rumours the tour is on the verge of collapse.

Reports last week suggested Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) is set to pull its financial support from the breakaway tour, placing its future in jeopardy.

LIV Golf chief executive Scott O’Neil has dismissed the concerns, stating in an email to staff, seen by the BBC, that the season would continue “uninterrupted and at full throttle”, and the tour has since confirmed it will return to Mexico’s Chapultepec Golf Club next year.

Spain’s Rahm, 31, romped to a six-stroke victory with a seven-under-par 64 in the final round to clinch his second win of the season on the LIV tour, finishing 21 under.

David Puig (-15) and Josele Ballester (-14) completed an all-Spanish podium.

Bryson DeChambeau, who won the previous two events, withdrew before the fourth round because of a wrist injury.

Rahm also won the team category with his Legion XIII team for the first time this year, with England’s Tyrrell Hatton and Northern Ireland’s Tom McKibbin both 11-under and Caleb Surratt two-under.

“A little bit disbelief,” said Rahm, who finished tied 38th at last week’s Masters.

“If you were to tell me last week on Thursday afternoon that I’ll be winning by a six-shot margin this week, I would not believe you because of how bad I played.”

LIV caused a ‘civil war’ in professional golf in 2022 when they started luring star names away from the PGA Tour with the offer of huge pay increases.

The PGA Tour and DP World Tour announced in 2023 that they had agreed to a merger with PIF, but there is still no sign of the union coming to fruition.

The LIV Golf League is scheduled to return from 7-10 May with LIV Golf Virginia in Washington DC.

Victor Wembanyama starred on his NBA play-off debut as the San Antonio Spurs beat the Portland Trail Blazers 111-98.

Wembanyama, one of three contenders for the Most Valuable Player award, scored a game-high 35 points, including 21 in the first half, as the Spurs won game one of the best-of-seven series.

“It’s good to get this one out of the way,” the Frenchman said. “We just tried to do the things we’ve been doing all year and stay solid.

“There was pressure on us to win the first game, but it wasn’t that much pressure if we just stayed to the plan.”

Elsewhere, defending champions Oklahoma City Thunder and the Boston Celtics both made dominant starts to the post-season.

The Thunder – the number one seeds in the Western Conference – thrashed the Phoenix Suns 119-84, led by last year’s Finals MVP Shai Gilgeous-Alexander who had 25 points, seven assists and four rebounds.

Jayson Tatum scored 25 points with 11 rebounds and seven assists – and Jaylen Brown added 26 points – as the second-seeded Celtics beat the Philadelphia 76ers 123-91.

Meanwhile, the Orlando Magic stunned Eastern Conference top seeds Detroit Pistons 112-101 to take a 1-0 lead in their seven-game series.

Victory for the eighth-seeded Magic, who qualified for the play-offs via the play-in tournament, extends an unwelcome NBA record for the Pistons, who have not won a post-season game at home for 11 matches dating back to 2008.

Forward Paolo Banchero starred with 23 points, nine rebounds and four assists, to help the Magic overshadow Pistons point guard Cade Cunningham’s play-off best haul of 39 points.

“[We] didn’t come out with the right energy, gave them life early on,” said Cunningham. “Then we had to deal with that for the rest of the game.

“There’s no confidence drop from us. It’s going to be a long, fun series.”

Down go the lights inside Sheffield’s Crucible Theatre, an overhead galaxy replaced by darkness.

Heavyweight auditorium doors thud closed. A handshake between the protagonists disguises hell-bent hunger to degrade each other as far as non-contact sport allows.

The world beyond this claustrophobic den of tension and turmoil becomes irrelevant. Phones are switched off, senses flick to high alert.

New energy fills the air: anxious, anticipative. Crowd commotion hits a heavy metal high and drops steeply to silence.

All that matters in this moment is one of life’s most edifying trivialities: snooker.

The gunshot clack that follows is resin on resin, the cue ball rippling off the pack of reds, signalling the start of a stage show without a script.

Rinse and repeat for 17 days. The marathon of the mind has begun.

Never take a result for granted at the Crucible; high stakes can discombobulate the very best.

“It has its own fingerprint as a snooker venue,” says six-time world champion Steve Davis.

“I’ve had moments in there when it’s been the most wonderful place. There were other times when I wanted the whole place to swallow me up because it was the worst place ever.”

Davis was humbled 10-1 on day one by Tony Knowles in 1982, his first year as defending champion. He was turned white as a sheet by Dennis Taylor in the 1985 black-ball final, then turned over by a Yorkshireman when Bradford’s Joe Johnson triumphed a year later.

Fortunately for him, Davis also has rip-roaring memories of triumph at the theatre that this year is staging the World Snooker Championship for a 50th time.

Most don’t.

Twenty-four men have lifted the trophy in Sheffield; hundreds have left empty-handed.

The Crucible and all that it entails chews up players, scars them. All the greats have been through the wringer. But what is it that makes the 980-seat venue so special?

How did a venue once considered a “dropout’s hangout” become snooker’s ultimate stage?

“It’s the history, the quirkiness, the layout of the arena, how close the spectators are. It’s everything,” says Crucible MC Rob Walker, a coiled spring each April.

“In 2018, Mark Williams shared a packet of Minstrels with somebody in the front row; he didn’t have to outstretch his arm, that’s how close they are.

“The players tell you there’s nowhere harder to win. That arena doesn’t look very big, but I can assure you that when there is a bum on every seat and the whole place is silent, and you are the one about to play – or in my case, speak – it’s huge.”

Intimidating?

“It can be,” says Walker. “You unequivocally feel it more there than anywhere else. It does strange things to you, that arena.”

“Over my dead body,” said Barry Hearn, then the chairman of World Snooker, amid suspicions some years ago that under his leadership the tournament might leave Sheffield.

Hearn, usually a money-making obsessive, has emotional ties to the Crucible stretching back decades.

He bounded across the theatre floor in 1981 to hug new champion Davis, who he managed. The next year, fuelled by that success, Hearn launched the promotions company that would become Matchroom, whose latest accounts showed annual turnover of £225m.

Hearn has forensic knowledge of the monetary value of sport. The possibility snooker could have made a quick killing by taking its premier event abroad, perhaps to China or Saudi Arabia, was clear. Hearn knew it, Sheffield knew it, the government knew it. All parties also knew what they could lose with such a move.

A deal with Sheffield took years to execute.

With bargaining chips galore, Hearn – no longer formally in charge but still a huge influence on snooker – hailed a people-pleasing agreement in March, when not only was a contract signed to keep the World Championship in Sheffield until 2045, but crucially a 500-seat expansion of the theatre was promised.

“The Crucible’s going to become even more famous and we haven’t lost our history, which is so important,” Hearn said. “My life changed in 1981 when Steve Davis won the World Championship. It’s unthinkable for us to play the World Championship anywhere else than this great venue.”

Sheffield’s economy is boosted by £4.5m each year by the event, with a media value – exposure through free publicity – worth over £3m on top. No wonder Sheffield City Council pays the World Snooker Tour a hefty staging fee, and not the other way round.

Many leading Chinese players live in Sheffield, while a string of top-tier academies have opened up. This is not simply a 17-day snooker city.

The man widely credited with bringing snooker to the Crucible is Mike Watterson, a sports promoter who later became chairman of Derby County football club.

But it was Watterson’s wife, Carole, who pitched the idea after watching a play there in 1976, five years after the theatre opened its doors.

“She said that the Crucible would be perfect for snooker,” said Watterson, who died in March 2019.

“Back then it was a dropout’s hangout, an embarrassment to the city. You’d go in and find dropouts lounging in there – beatniks, we used to call them. It was always getting slated by the city and the people.”

What made it credible as a snooker venue was the size and shape of the stage, surrounded on three sides by the audience.

Mike enquired and was told it was 34ft wide. Not wide enough.

On closer inspection, it was 36ft. Those two feet made the difference between the World Championship remaining a perpetual roadshow and putting down roots in the Steel City from 1977 to the present day.

Two snooker tables can sit parallel, separated by a dividing wall, with just enough space for the players to roam and fully stretch out on all their shots.

In the decade before its Sheffield arrival, the final had been played in towns and cities spread as far apart as Bolton, Birmingham, Sydney and Melbourne.

Sheffield had its turn – then it got a second year, and a third.

“You never can tell if something’s going to work,” Watterson said a decade ago. “I don’t think I imagined at all the tournament would be in Sheffield for so long.”

Australia’s Neil Robertson, the 2010 world champion, points to limited player facilities, with just two practice tables “not really ideal”.

But Robertson welcomed the long-term plans as “amazing news”, assuming players aren’t an afterthought when rebuilding begins.

“The thing that hopefully never changes is the walk down the stairs into the arena,” Robertson said. “It just hits you, with all the amazing players who have walked down there over the years.

“It’s the only venue where we’ve been playing for decades. You can’t ignore the history attached to it.”

And this is the nub of it: history.

Alex Higgins and baby daughter Lauren in 1982. Dennis Taylor wagging his finger in ’85. Ronnie O’Sullivan’s five-minute maximum. White the exasperated nearly man. The dominant Davis and Stephen Hendry decades.

Rob Maul covers snooker for the Sun and Shane McDermott has been a mainstay of the media room for the Mirror.

As Maul says: “You can’t ignore the history. It’s a pilgrimage I’ve done since 2018 and I feel honoured to do it, but there are people in that building who have done it for decades and decades and decades.

“That’s the unique thing about snooker: they’ve kept the Hendrys in the sport, and they’re still working. John Parrott’s commentating. And that legacy is something you don’t throw away lightly.

“When you walk around the city, you see Steve Davis, and Jimmy White will come by if he’s working. And so much has changed in other sports, but snooker’s fundamentally the same game that these legends were playing.”

McDermott says: “You see the same faces year on year, people who have been coming every year since 1977. Sadly some of them are coming less and less because of age.

“I can remember after matches perhaps nipping out of the press room for a minute and bumping into John Virgo as he left the commentary box. You’d have a little nod and say hello. That’s one thing everyone will miss this year.”

Faces in the crowd, faces in the commentary box, faces at the table. Here one year, gone the next.

In recent times, snooker has lost Virgo, Ray Reardon, Willie Thorne and Terry Griffiths, among others. Broadcaster and journalist Clive Everton and Bafta-nominated former BBC snooker executive producer Nick Hunter have left us too.

The booming voice and laughter of Thorne, the gentle humour of Griffiths, the wisdom of Everton, the dry wit of Virgo.

They were part of the fixtures and fittings.

And in their own particular ways, they each played a telling role in the Crucible becoming what it was never built to be: snooker’s home.