We all lose in a race to bring back live sport
SPORTSPEOPLE always want to win the race. So when Premiership Rugby’s chief executive Darren Childs announced this week that his sport was determined to be the first back onTV after the current hiatus, he probably thought he was reflecting the views of his players.
Serve up that precious fix of live action, please the broadcasters and sponsors and beat the competition while they’re at it – what’s not to like?
Only the fact that a headlong rush back onto the playing fields would be a betrayal of the fight the nation is currently undertaking.
The players want to play, yes, but only when it is safe for them, their teammates, their opponents and their families.
Not when it suits an empty television schedule and a boardroom boss who has spectacularly missed the point.
A crisis like the one we find ourselves in brings out the best and the worst in people.
There have been countless examples of sport and sportsmen doing the right thing over the recent dizzying days.
Jose Mourinho’s bag packing, Carlo Ancelotti’s calls to the lonely, Amir Khan handing over his wedding hall to the NHS – it is heartwarming to see how the big names have mirrored the rest of the country in coming together at this critical moment.
But there is always somebody who lets the side down.
And in announcing his goal, Childs, above, sounded like the bloke intent on hosting a barbecue when everyone else is obeying lockdown.
In his past life Childs was a television executive but this is real life, not some TV drama.
Behind-closed-doors rugby, midweek rugby, multi-game matchdays...his thoughts smacked of a fantasy world somewhere in another galaxy from the present reality.
Club rugby’s financial desperation is evidently warping priorities.
Professional rugby union has always practised back-of-a-fag packet economics – the Premiership clubs lost £45m between them last year – but existing holes are being widened uncomfortably by this period of inactivity.
Premiership Rugby is not the only organisation which is struggling. The financial high-wire many sports operate on means that even with the government’s furlough pay, they are in trouble.
The response, though, cannot be to risk the health of the players and of wider society.The NHS have other priorities than to service sports fixtures. Doing the right thing means doing nothing. When UEFA and the IOC are moving the Euros and the Olympics into 2021, it should be clear which way the tide is flowing.
To swim against it by trying to fastforward the return to competitive sport is grand folly. It is a lesson which would be well-learnt by the Premier League as they privately work towards a June 1 return date.
There is much water to flow under the bridge before then. Maybe our collective actions will have changed the Covid-19 equation by then and maybe some degree of normality will have returned. If the country is in a safe space for sport to resume, that will be great. But do not push the envelope.
We all want to see sport’s resurrection and it will seem all the more captivating when it arrives but there is no hurry. This is a longdistance race.