We’re all kicking our heels without football

Welcome to the match report that isn’t of the Old Firm clash that wasn’t. There were supposed to be hundreds of words on these pages chronicling the agony and the ecstasy of a meeting at Ibrox that could well have gone a long way to deciding the destiny of the Premiership title.

It’s now possible that this question, like currently unresolved issues in every league in the land, might never be settled.

When we do go again, it will likely be a brand new season. The hope is this will be as soon as July/august, but perhaps even that is wishful thinking. No one knows what will happen. No one knows when the whistle will blow to signal a re-start.

What is becoming clearer after just the first weekend of this strange, sports-less landscape, is the extent to which football, rugby and other sports bookend our weeks.

Not so long ago, the idea of self-isolating actually seemed quite attractive. Before the seriousness of this virus really took hold, it was possible to feel quite jealous of those tourists coming back from cruise ships and being deposited straight into isolation units. Just imagine, with all that downtime and with no daily chores to attend to, how much sport could be watched on television.

Finally, we could make good those expensive subscription sports channels we pay for and never have the luxury of watching.

Now many of us do have the downtime, just no sport to watch. It’s like the episode of The Twilight Zone titled Time Enough At Last, where the protagonist, a bookish chap who works as a bank teller and is ridiculed for his obsession with reading, is the sole survivor of an H bomb attack having been downstairs in a vault at the time eating lunch.

His understandable dismay on his return to find a rubble strewn landscape is soothed considerably when he stumbles upon the contents of a library. He is exultant. Finally, he has all the time in the world to read – and no one to admonish him. But to his – and the viewers’ horror – his spectacles fall off his nose when he bends down to pick up one of these books and are completely smashed. There will be no more reading.

Will there be no more watching football? Not for a while, certainly. It already feels like we have woken up in a postapocalyptic wasteland. Saturday was surreal in the extreme. Sky Sports tried valiantly to whip up excitement for the Notts County v Eastleigh clash in the National League and it was easy to get drawn in in the absence of anything else. The same applied to Dover Athletic v Chesterfield, where the magnificentlynamednassim L’ghoul struck a late equaliser for the home team. Get in! This is what it had come to. In between times, we were taken by live feed to a very empty sports hall in Surrey for the countdown to a netball match. We even had a twominute interlude watching Fifa president Gianni Infantino, left, washing his hands. The look on the faces of the redoubtable presenters when we returned to the studio said it all. Jeff Stelling, by the way, had been given the afternoon off. Get used to it Jeff.

Resorting to Twitter was not much better since some clubs – or at least those in charge of their official Twitter feeds – had decided to do that ghastly thing where clubs’ Twitter accounts talk to one another. Worse, they were challenging each other to games of noughts and crosses and connect four. It was not even realistic. In what world, post-apocalyptic or not, would Bayer O4 Leverkusen

“We were taken by live feed to a very empty sports hall in Surrey for the countdown to a netball match. We even had a two-minute interlude watching Fifa president Gianni Infantino washing his hands. The look on the faces of the presenters when we returned to the studio said it all”

be playing (and losing to) Hull City, as was the cringe-inducing case on Saturday afternoon.

BBC Radio Scotland’s Off the Ball reacted well to the crisis of there being no actual football. For a show that’s not about football, or at least proposes to take a sideways look at the game, this was expected. Admirably, they invited the Scottish government’s national clinical director on to the show to answer listeners’ questions about coronavirus. Petty and ill informed? Not on this occasion.

Still, it was hard all the same not to think about all those cathedrals of football sitting empty throughout the land. The turnstiles remaining resolutely unclicked, the pre and post-match pints unpoured, debates unspoken and match reports unwritten.

It’s hard to break the habit of a life