The news had broken that the First Division club had introduced dance training to its players and the media besieged the Blades' Bramall Lane ground, eager to snap such stars as Wayne Quinn and Marcus Bent in tights and ballet shoes, prancing about the pitch to the strains of Tchaikovsky's Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy. The club kept its doors firmly closed and instead issued an exclusive invitation to the Daily Express to come to the team's Abbeydale Training Ground and see what has really been going on. We've got to overcome all the prejudices that surround football today. The game's moving on. It's not as old-fashioned as it used to be, but a lot of players, and clubs, are stuck with the routines they've been brought up with.
Continental players are more health conscious.
We've got to open our minds to programmes like dance training. Like any dance class, a long sequence of movements is broken into four or five short sections which are practised individually before being welded together. Five feet two inches tall, blonde and pencil thin, Jane occasionally disappears into a barely controlled mob of adolescents, red of strip and face, only to emerge sparkly eyed and triumphant. Sheffield United's involvement with dance began two years ago, when Yorkshire Arts, one of Britain's 10 regional arts boards, designed two experimental courses for the Centre of Excellence training school. Dance training has been subtly infiltrating football clubs in the North of England since 1997, when Yorkshire Arts pulled together the FA, football coaches and professional dancers to compare notes on fitness, injury avoidance and training.