Failure to deliver now would be a dagger to nation’s sporting heart

Hgovernment’s roadmap offers glimmer of hope for a glorious summer after a long year scarred by Covid

It is one of the great ironies of the Prime Minister’s road map that a document he assured would be driven by “data, not dates” has ended up buoying the nation through its time-specific mapping of an end to Covid despair. So clearly signposted are the stages of lockdown release that on April 12 it will be impossible to buy a haircut for love or money, while May 17 is already circled in the calendar as the green light, in all likelihood, to Manchester City toasting a third Premier League title in front of 10,000 of their fans.

As for the bounty promised on June 21, it is almost too much to digest in one sitting. “All legal limits on social contact can be removed,” the Government declares. For anybody who loves sport, the implications are tantalising. A full lifting of all restrictions should equate to England playing the Czech Republic before 90,000 at Wembley and Novak Djokovic walking out for his Wimbledon defence on a packed Centre Court.

Across the land, hope surges anew. It is hard not to shake a sense that June 21, the day at this latitude when the sun shines for longest, has been chosen deliberately to symbolise a collective prevailing over Covid. Just as the shortest day last December was bleak, with Christmas officially cancelled, so the summer solstice offers the Government a symmetrical way of bookending the nightmare. Those in power recognise that nothing galvanises like hope. Followers of sport, though, understand it is also the hope that kills you.

Scarred by a year of Covid turmoil, sport is wise to withhold judgment on the prospect of a midsummer liberation. Rewind to July 31 last year, the hottest day in decades in the South of England, and recall how the organisers of Glorious Goodwood were forced to dismantle their plans for socially-distanced picnics with 24 hours’ notice. As for the comeback of crowds, the upper limit of 4,000 was never reached, as it only ever applied to Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly. As so often in that matrix of regional restrictions, it all ended in tiers.

Against such a backdrop, sport’s initial response to the suggestion of a cathartic June carnival has been characterised by caution. “We look forward to a return to full stadiums as soon as it is safe and possible,” said the Football Association, realising that it would be impolitic to lapse into more grandiose “let freedom ring” pronouncements. After all, since it issued its first statement of commitment to bringing supporters back, 222 days ago, Wembley has hosted an FA Cup final, a Community Shield and five England games without fans.

Out of this abandoned wilderness, the Government appears determined to recapture the soul of Boxpark Croydon. You may remember how, in those heady days of 2018, no TV report of an England World Cup victory was complete without footage of thousands of lagers being hurled into the air. Then, being coated in discarded beer every time Harry Kane scored seemed a dubious way

The sporting bounty promised after June 21 is almost too much to digest in one sitting

to pass the time. Today, after 12 months’ enforced isolation, it looks like bliss. For what better way to purge the trauma than with a sporting hoedown like no other?

Over the next four months, sport will be of fundamental importance to national revival. It is a consistent thread through all four stages of the route ahead, from the restoration of school sport in 12 days’ time to the decriminalising of golf and tennis three weeks later. Boris Johnson has, unwittingly or otherwise, fired the starting pistol on a summer of sport to balm a battered country.

There will be some tension, though, to see whether this glorious vision will be delivered, or cruelly snatched away. Trust in sport, weary of the rhetoric of grand reopenings, is thin. The proffered hope is seductive, but fragile. “It’s not the despair,” as John Cleese’s timeless line reminds us. “I can take the despair. It’s the hope I can’t stand.”

Hope is a commodity in which this Government has traded far too loosely. For the sake of our sporting futures, let us dare believe that this time, it will be honoured.