Will sport learn to coexist with the virus?
The pandemic brought sport to a grinding halt. Now, athletes are slowly returning to the arena but stands remain empty, new rules have been introduced and ticket sales are down
Sharp and sinuous, the blast of a weddingprocession style trumpet heralded the arrival of a cricket carnival every March since 2008. Through the duration of the Indian Premier League (IPL), it was a tune you could not escape. This time, it has fallen silent. The silence begs a question: Will 2020 be the year of no Twenty20?
It is among the many things we don’t know as the coronavirus disease (Covid-19) pandemic continues its grim run.
What we also don’t know is whether March 8 will be the last time in 2020 that a crowd was allowed into an Indian stadium. That Sunday night, 50,102 at the Salt Lake stadium watched ATK overturn a first-leg semi-final defeat to beat Bengaluru FC and enter the final of the Indian Super League (ISL). Six days later, in what was the last sports event in India, ATK won their third title at a stadium surreally silent.
Who knew then that Europe’s football cathedrals would be running on empty when India marked 100 days of solitude? Or that a version of the 17th century Dutch word ‘verlof’ would figure in conversations about superrich football clubs, Cricket Australia and Formula One? Having become part of sports lexicon -along with salary cuts, self-isolation, hand hygiene, face masks and physical distancing -- ‘furlough’ isn’t leaving anytime soon. That’s because you can’t have major competitions in a world with nearly 450,000 dead.
“Football is important but it is not the most important thing now,” said Kibu Vicuna, who coached Mohun Bagan to the 2019-20 I-League title.
Wimbledon’s cancelling this year’s edition on April 1 wasn’t an All Fools’ Day prank but a first since World War II. On April 15, the IPL was “suspended till further notice”. Scheduled from June 12 in 12 cities, the European football championship was moved to 2021 on March 17. One week later, so was the Olympics. Like Wimbledon, this was another first since WWII. The deferment of the Tokyo Games will leave a dream unfulfilled for Japanese rugby star Kenki ‘Ferrari’ Fukuoka ,who will now focus on becoming a doctor.
There were odd pockets of resistance. There was volleyball in Russia, badminton and table tennis in Armenia, basketball and football in Nicaragua and football in Belarus and Turkmenistan. But in most of the planet, sport paused with the suddenness of a last-second, stoppage-time goal.
For two months, it was all quiet on the sporting front. Some got cabin fever though. Novak Djokovic hit balls in Marbella a week before sporting facilities were scheduled to reopen; Jose Mourinho and Tanguy Ndombele, Tottenham Hotspur coach and midfielder, broke lockdown rules as did Real Madrid’s Luka Jovic, Juventus’s Douglas Costa and Everton’s Oumar Niasse.
In India, athletes and coaches, just like hundreds of thousands of other people, were caught off guard by the suddenness of the lockdown. At the Sports Authority of India (SAI) facility in Bengaluru, the national men’s and women’s hockey squads as well as coaches and support staff found themselves trapped for the duration of the various phases of the lockdown.
The same fate befell Mirabai Chanu and eight of India’s weightlifting squad, and javelin thrower Neeraj Chopra, who were stuck at the National Institute of Sports (NIS) in Patiala.
But athletes are resourceful. They found ways to keep fit, to stay in touch with their sport. India opener Mayank Agarwal worked out at home; Kuldeep Yadav honed his craft on his terrace; Gurpreet Singh Sandhu donned goalkeeping gloves in Australia; Dutee Chand trained in Bhubaneswar’s Kalinga Stadium; rifle shooter Divyansh Pawar fired away at a range rigged up in his coach’s flat, and online coaching classes became the new normal.
“You miss one day’s training and it takes six days to get back to where you were,” Chanu, on whose four feet nine inches rest India’s hopes for a weightlifting medal in the Olympics, said during the national championships in Kolkata last February. It was why Chanu missed her sister’s wedding in Manipur even though she was done winning the 49kg gold. In 2017, en route being a world champion, another sister had tied the knot.
“I keep telling them, ‘can’t you get married some other time?’” she said. It has been nine months since Chanu last saw her family. For the past 10 years, home for her has been a room in NIS Patiala and downtime, a visit to a nearby mall on Sunday evening. Now, her Olympic training schedule has been ripped apart by Covid-19.
As a way of living with the virus, Test cricket will allow Covid-19 substitutes and athletics events will have chlorine in steeplechase water jumps. Training protocols for athletes in India too have been overhauled.
Coaches above 65 have been told to stay away by SAI; athletes are being taught disinfection practices; there are hygiene officers and Covid Task Forces. Before every session, athletes will have their temperatures taken and there will be a health check-up every week.
Like in Europe’s football leagues, Indian athletes must do their laundry. The Premiership’s guide to resuming training details separate routes for entry and exit, thermal testing and Bundesliga players have to answer six questions before breakfast about how they are feeling. Players drink from individual bottles with their names on them. In South Korea, K-League has paid for testing over 1,000 players and staff and Bundesliga is committed to 25,000 tests by the time the season ends.
A RETURN
India’s swimmers are waiting for the green light to hit the pool but by the time Chanu and 50 athletes in Patiala were allowed to train on May 27, live sport had returned.
Baseball and football were back in South Korea and Taiwan. The first PGA Tour event in three months ended last Sunday. On May 16, with five substitutes Bundesliga became the first of the big five leagues to resume. Spain’s La Liga began on June 11, the Premier League on Wednesday and Serie A three days later.
But to say it felt strange watching football in empty stadiums -- or it would to see Virat Kohli raise his bat to, well, no one -- is understating the obvious. Roger Federer thinks the idea is unfeasible. “There is no question that the fans are a missing factor,” Bundesliga winners Bayern Munich coach Hansi Flick said. Yet, in the absence of a vaccine that is how it could stay when the 2020-21 football season begins, if India tour Australia and, who knows, maybe even in the Olympics.
Loss of revenue through ticket sales is a story for another day but what empty stands will also mean is being denied the chance to watch the reception Jose Mourinho gets as the away team coach at Chelsea’s home, Stamford Bridge.
It will mean teams not being intimidated by deep purple at Eden Gardens when Kolkata Knight Riders play and the ‘Yellow Wall’ at Borussia Dortmund’s Signal Iduna Park. And it could peel off Liverpool’s invincibility at home.
Does it explain why 45 of the 56 Bundesliga games on resumption have been won by away teams? Like with many things about the pandemic --- and whether we will see Federer or Leander Paes play again --- the short answer is: we don’t know.
But every crisis is also an opportunity. Anil Kumble, the ICC Cricket Committee chairman, has said he hopes the ban on applying saliva on the ball will have more spinners playing Tests. And as cold turkey hits the experience of being on the bleachers, closed-door sport could mean gold dust for fantasy leagues. It is an industry predicted to be worth Rs 11,900 crore in India by 2023 with a user base of 100 million by 2021. Should IPL happen this year, gaming platforms should hit pay dirt with Dream 11s.
Talking about sport now can seem trite but if we do, these past few months have been so dystopian that they seem comparable to the alternate reality of Netflix’s ‘The Man In The High Castle’. Based on Philip K Dick’s book by the same name, it is set in US ruled by Germany and Japan who won WWII. Sport’s tentative resumption in our world feels like the black-andwhite films in the series that depict history as we know it. It is a flickering of hope.