Gambling is the one pandemic that nobody can stop

Declan Lynch Cheltenham (Virgin Three)

WE have sometimes alluded in these pages to the power of the betting corporations, and how they somehow always seem to get what they want.

However they manage it, if they want legislation to be delayed as long as is humanly possible, that is what happens. If they want to “own” numerous sports through sponsorship or advertising, despite all the warnings about the epidemic of gambling addiction, that is what they get.

And last week as we flipped from channel to channel looking at nothing but report and report on the world closing down due to the coronavirus, when we arrived at Virgin Three there was Cheltenham.

Yes there they were, the hordes of punters and layers, in what seemed like a micro-climate, a little corner of the earth where the rules of science and nature no longer apply.

Every other business, every other citizen in every other place was giving up something, maybe even giving up something very important. But the gambling must go on, the gambling can never stop even for a pandemic — indeed you could say that the gambling is a pandemic unto itself, one which apparently renders its victims immune from this other disease that is sweeping the world.

But we’ll have to wait to see how that one pans out — and in the meantime all the other sports which are so essential to our lives, were trying to keep going, some of them with no crowds.

Some of us were trying to work out how we might feel if, say, Liverpool won the now-suspended League for the first time in 30 years, in a match that was played in the Charlie Rich style, “Behind Closed Doors”.

This would be surrealism on the grand scale.

“Surreal” is one of those words that has lost a certain amount of its meaning, as it now means almost anything that is a bit unusual. But for a team to win the League in an empty stadium, with the multitudes elsewhere celebrating as best they can, perhaps even gathered in their thousands outside the empty stadium — now that would be surreal.

And now we are discovering a new and truly terrible world, one in which there is no sport at all, these events without which our lives may become unmanageable.

They’ve called off The Masters, usually held in April. But what if there is no Snooker World Championship? Will we spend the rest of the year with a vague sense that something is missing from our lives — something we had assumed would be there for ever?

We had been looking forward to the football in the European Championships and to the Olympics Games this summer, having suffered the unspeakable horrors last year of a summer with no such massive sporting event.

Are we now looking into that abyss too? Along with all the other abysses into which we are looking?

Perhaps the best we can hope for is that some day in the not-too-distant future, sports will not be cancelled but will be held “behind closed doors” — even the horse racing.

And while this will certainly detract from the atmosphere in the ground, it can still be seen on television — arguably most sports events are essentially TV events anyway, with the crowds at the stadium merely serving as providers of noise and general colour. Maybe the TV companies can find some way to create fake crowd noises, as they may well be doing already.

But as long as people can eventually watch it on TV, with or without atmosphere, our world will continue in some sort of recognisable form.

Because as long as it’s on TV, or some other such device, not only can people watch it, they can also gamble on it.

And that is all that matters.