Sound of the crowd won’t be missed by some

With the football season back up and running, the lack of crowd must be a mixed blessing for the players.

For the referee it can only be a good thing. The match official is regularly questioned, berated and abused by fans, players and managing staff, so at least this takes one of those parties out of the equation. Doing your job with only a couple of dozen people constantly on your case counts as light relief for the man, or woman, in black. (The phrase ‘woman in black’ in reference to female referees can lead to confusion with the horror franchise but might at least encourage people to treat her better, for fear of being terrorised by a ghostly horse-drawn carriage).

The artificial crowd noise now being employed to add atmosphere to the fag-end of the Premier League season is both necessary and pretty clever, employing the same technology used for video game FIFA and requiring a sound engineer to press the right button.

The cheering of fake spectators is necessary because anyone who has ever played in or watched a sparsely attended football match will know that the soundtrack is mainly people swearing, combined with the odd bit of tactical advice. The alternative would be to have the sound engineer poised with a bleep device.

There is something strangely quaint about the reaction of the virtual crowd, who are prone more to ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’ than taunts or abusive chants. It sometimes feels more like watching the action from a more innocent time, a post-war clash in black and white, where the players still smoked on the pitch.

A similar crowd effect was not employed for last week’s coverage of the cricket test between England and the West Indies, with wickets and near-misses instead being greeted with an eerie silence.

If we’re still in this situation when the world snooker championships come round, I’m very much looking forward to hearing some virtual coughing and throat clearance.

‘Anyone who has ever played in or watched a sparselyattended football match will know that the soundtrack is mainly people swearing’

The KM Group columnist with his own look at the world