Just Stop Oil are only scoring an own goal by disrupting sports events

Since they are all the rage at the moment it seems like a good time to form a new sporting protest group – stop the sporting protest. Big events are feeling vulnerable at the moment after the raids on Aintree and the Crucible by protestors.

The fears of copycat attacks from other organisations with causes to promote are well-founded. Showpiece sporting occasions are like giant billboards – disrupting them makes headlines – so you can see why it is tempting to target them.

Here’s the point though. Have this week’s stunts by Animal Rising and Just Stop Oil actually changed any minds with their actions? The answer is no. If anything they have turned people off.

The Grand National and the World Snooker Championships are, in their differing ways, sporting institutions in this country. People mess with those at their peril. The right to peaceful protest is part of living in a democracy. A vital one too.

But the message to the self-appointed saviours of the planet and friends of the voiceless should be to take their fight elsewhere. Animal Rising say their intention in delaying the start of the Grand National was to start a conversation but the main one overheard at Aintree while they were attempting to scale the perimeter fencing was whether the delay they had caused would be long enough to get another drink in before the race.

People don’t go to sports events to broaden their minds, they go for a day out and an escape from dealing with the heavy stuff. There is a debate to be had around animal welfare in horse racing – and there was rightly one after the death of Hill Sixteen in the National – but it did not need Animal Rising and their ladders to provoke it.

As for the surreal orange powder attack by Just Stop Oil in Sheffield, their baize-staining stunt was certainly eye-catching. It was quite possibly the most surprising thing seen at The Crucible since Bill Werbeniuk ordered a slimline tonic. But you had to wonder whether the protest group had got the right event.

If you were an anti-gas-guzzling group looking for an event to target you could understand if F1 was in your sights or maybe even the Premier League given the 20-minute private flights some clubs take to away games but Robert Milkins against Joe Perry at the World Snooker Championships? Is oil used on wooden cues? If it is, surely it isn’t the sort that comes out of the ground.

Just Stop Oil’s explanation afterwards was that the attack was part of a call to arms to sporting organisations to rise up against government policy on their pet issue. They must be living in cloud cuckoo land. Barry Hearn has plenty of contacts in his book but even he doesn’t have an energy hotline to Rishi Sunak.

So what’s next this summer? Someone glueing themselves to Rory McIlroy’s driver at The Open Championship, maybe? A red re-spray for Centre Court at Wimbledon? Or maybe something more theatrical? Switching the Ashes urn to one primed to drip fake blood onto the whites of the winning captain as he raises it to the skies, perhaps?

Sport is an inviting target given the attention on it and a soft one too given the resources it needs to make somewhere like a golf course entirely secure but disruption tactics represent an own goal. In the battle to win hearts and minds, weaponising sport is a case of the activists barking up the wrong tree.