Changing face of crisis makes return difficult to predict
The UK Government is planning to this week set up the first of regular meetings involving senior medical directors of the major sports in a bid to return to action as soon as possible.
However, Scottish sport is already united in the fight to overcome the coronavirus crisis, and get back playing,
Dr James Robson, the SRU’s chief medical officer, knows there is an appetite to restart the sporting calendar as soon as possible.
But he’s acutely aware of the risks of restarting sport at any level, to the players, crowds and the population at large.
“I think everybody will come to a realisation that there will be a period of time that is required,” says the man who has acted as team doctor at six Rugby World Cups with Scotland, and on six Lions tours.
“The difficulty is that everything is changing almost on a daily basis.
“My thinking at the moment is very much that if somebody was to tell me we can start in four weeks’ time, would we be able to do that?
“Rugby, for example, would probably need a minimum of four weeks, possibly slightly less, but probably not.
“It’s difficult for me to comment about other sports, but we’re certainly trying to get crosscollaboration between the medics of all the sports to help each other prepare for what might be afterwards.
“But the longer we have a down period, of course, the longer it’s likely to take.
“It would appear that football feels that they would require less time than we would in rugby.
“We have that need for reconditioning the guys for contact. That’s something that can’t be introduced in isolation.
“I have been speaking to my counterparts in the SFA, in European Golf and the Scottish Institute of Sport, among others.
“We’ve been discussing, collaborating and pooling information for the past few weeks because we see that as the way forward.
“We also have a WhatsApp group for the chief medical officers of the Unions, and if anybody comes across an article or a paper of interest, they’re putting it on that domain so that we all get instant access.
“You can’t keep abreast of the myriad of information that’s coming in as a single person.”
Dr Robson does, though, give some hope that football’s Scottish Premiership could restart more quickly than the crossborder PRO14 in which Glasgow and Edinburgh compete.
“In a tournament like the PRO14, you’ve got more factors to think about and to mitigate for,” he said.
“It makes it more complex than looking at a tournament within Scotland.
“You’ve got to work your way through. Start with individual training, then group training and then return to team training.
“You’ve then got to try to play somebody locally and, if that works, you start to bring somebody in that’s less local but still within the same country.
“Then you start to move out very carefully to bring people in from other countries that are allowed in.
“But this is a very complex situation and one that’s going to take a bigger brain than mine to solve.
“There are lots of people working on this, in lots of sports. That’s why I implore that we all share knowledge and help us get back to sport timeously and safely.”