Sport is back – but will it ever return to the way we loved it?
How much are you missing sport right now? Let’s be honest, it plays an important role in society. For true fanatics, it gets them out of bed in the morning. For others, it’s an irritant they could do without. They’re the people who grit their teeth at the prospect of events like Rugby World Cups dominating social discourse for weeks on end.
Before the world changed, they might already have been grimly anticipating the Tokyo Olympics.
For many of us, though, sport is part of the fabric of our society. It has the ability to suspend our sometimes difficult individual realities, the power to unify. What it literally had, until about the middle of March, was the power to physically bring people together.
It’s slightly ironic that the convenience of television has been a big factor in reducing match attendances, but will now be our only link to Super Rugby Aotearoa when it kicks off on June 13. Expensive TV rights have become rugby’s lifeblood; now they’re also the only remaining artery connecting it to its audience.
Given yesterday’s move to gatherings of up to 100 under alert level 2, I’m sure plenty of fans will watch games on big screens in clubrooms and sports bars, full of atmosphere. One of my most memorable Super Rugby experiences was wandering down from the local holiday park to a vibrant pub in Akaroa in April 1999, on my first trip to New Zealand, to watch a fiery southern derby, won 23-6 by the Highlanders.
I was brought up to love sport, and it’s been a passionate 40-year affair, moments of unbridled joy and gut-punching disappointment the occasional companions to a generally happy obsession with a wide range of codes. Eight years as a sports writer in South Africa took me to places I otherwise probably wouldn’t have got to; Kuala Lumpur for the Commonwealth Games, Sydney for the Olympics, Athens, Wimbledon, St Andrew’s, Royal Troon. Most importantly it introduced me to New Zealand, in the company of a fairly decent cricket team.
But while the initial absence of sport as Covid-19 swept the globe definitely felt like a blow, I have to admit I haven’t missed it as much as instinct said I would. I suspect my brain is experiencing a degree of relief. There’s so much sport now – or there was – it sometimes feels like events blur into each other, a constant stream of shouty, colourful noise. I don’t particularly miss that.
For the genuine sports fan, I think the emotion tied to following a team is important, and that’s been lost to an extent because it’s coming at us all the time. Football team lost? Never mind. What’s happening in the cricket, rugby, netball, baseball, basketball, golf, tennis etc?
Maybe it’s partly my age. I’m sure youngsters are still filled with wide-eyed wonder at the feats of their sporting heroes. But I look back on the emotions I experienced as a kid and sense how much the occasional highs were made higher by the more frequent lows. The rollercoaster thrill of watching Arsenal first squander a two-goal lead over Manchester United in two minutes in the 1979 FA Cup final, and then win it with an Alan Sunderland goal a minute later, was huge.
It was bigger because of the crushing disappointment of the previous season’s deserved 1-0 loss to Ipswich Town. Back then, there weren’t 1000 sporting distractions to take my mind off it. I spent a year processing. The 3-2 win over United was the payoff for my pain.
Those All Blacks fans who lived through the barren 24 years between World Cup triumphs in 1987 and 2011 will get this. The string of bitter losses surely made those back-to-back titles all the sweeter.
I’ve just read that the English Premier League will resume on June 17, so I’ve almost run out of time to say it. I think football, my first sporting love, has been ruined by the involvement of too much money, with many clubs now billionaires’ playthings, the game far too unequal as a result, and fans gouged every which way to help pay for it. I would love to think our new normal would change that, but I doubt it.
I also can’t stop thinking about how the first leg of the Champions League tie between Italian club Atalanta and Spanish team Valencia, on February 19, has been described as ‘‘a biological bomb’’ in the spread of Covid-19. Some 40,000 Atalanta fans travelled from Bergamo to Milan’s San Siro for their club’s biggest match ever; others travelled from Spain. We know the rest.
Football will be played in empty stadiums for some time, I suspect, but genuine fans will be comforted by its return and TV audiences will be massive. But there’s something slightly perverse about the TV money tap being turned back on, while the fans who give clubs their identity are shut out. I hope the clubs, and the game as a whole, are having a good think about the importance of those people as they look ahead to when they can welcome them back.