Sport’s a sideshow .. but in long run it will pull us back together
There’s a few phrases we’ll hear a lot about in the coming days, weeks and months.
Sport doesn’t matter. Sport is not important in the grand scheme. Sport gets put in to perspective at times like these.
It’s fair comment. No-one can claim it’s a big deal what colour of jersey sticks a bag of air in to a net when there’s talk of NHS intensive care units buckling and hundreds of thousands of people’s lives at risk.
All the talk of trophies and tournaments is trivial.
Your favourite boxer’s big fight in Las Vegas gets binned? You can’t see guys whacking a ball around a theme park while trying to win a naff green blazer.
It all sounds ridiculous when it is boiled down to the bare bones. Sport is a sideshow right now.
This is a time when we need to be wrapping our elderly relatives in cotton wool, protecting our vulnerable and shielding our NHS from the worst-case scenarios.
But you know what? In the next few weeks and months we are also going to find out just why sport is so damn important.
Because now the reality of life without it for the foreseeable has sunk in, it hardly bares thinking about.
By the time all of the blows over – and let’s just pray this government herd immunity policy isn’t as risky as it sounds – then we might just be able to re-assess our entire perception of sport, because it’s got away from us in recent times.
Sport is an entertainment but people have taken a lot of the fun out of sport.
Well, not all sport. Look at Cheltenham last week. There could have been a nuclear war raging and that lot would still be grinning in the Guinness Tent waving around 20 quid notes.
In football though, too many people have lost their sense of fun. Often it’s been replaced by anger, hatred, bitterness and resentment.
We were meant to have an Old Firm game today. Even that would have some folk frothing at the mouth.
Fans of both clubs would be feuding like the wee folk in Gulliver’s Travels fighting over how they boil their eggs.
Here’s hoping this period of self-isolation might lead to some self-reflection. Don’t bet on it though.
We will find out though, just how big a part sport plays in all of our lives.
Kids’ football, rugby and gymnastics, the Saturday morning fitba team, the pensioners teeing up in a midweek morning, meeting yyour ppals to go to the pub and on to a game.
Texting your old m man to get his tips fo for the Major, the b bubbling at your h hero’s triumph o or disaster, the nation gripped to together in hope – or despair.
Sport isn’t just a hobby, it’s part o of our lives. So w what the heck are we going to do without it for the t time being?
It’s not like the c close season or w t winter break. This time there’s going to bbe nothing.hi
Week one might be okay. We’ve got Netflix and that pile of books we’ve never read.
Week two is going to bite – Old Firm fans will have to start arguing over the previous night’s Eastenders.
After three, four, five weeks and beyond, people will start getting delirious. There will be a campaign to get Neil Lennon and Steven Gerrard to square up on the PlayStation.
We are soon going to find out just how much sport means to us. No matter how much it divides us, it is a major factor that brings us together.
Isolation will never feel more real than when sports’ absence hits home.
In the next few months we are going to find out why sport is important .. it divides us but it’s factor that brings us together