SPORT MUST PREPARE ITSELF FOR THE WORST
AS if Sunday night and Monday morning hadn’t been anxious enough for those of a sporting hue, with every passing moment yesterday the bulletins and twitter updates were literally infected with much more of a chilling impact. Suddenly, it seemed like March again. The three top stories were nominally about sporting events but they weren’t really about sporting events at all.
And the fourth was about the confirmation that there won’t be any sporting events in the GAA for another three weeks.
As Ireland headed to Slovakia yesterday afternoon, news broke of a positive Covid-19 test amongst a member of the backroom staff.
There was no immediate threat to players or manager. Still, given that it is possible to fit 500 million of these voraciously infectious viruses in the full stop at the end of this sentence, the pale facts must cause alarm.
The HSE, even if merely following established protocol, responded by confirming FAI compliance with public health rules before allowing the squad permission to leave the country. UEFA had to green light the tie. The FAI have rarely faltered in confirming compliance, at all levels of the sport since resumption, so nobody would have expected them to have been grounded.
And yet it is another reminder of the naked vulnerability everyone is exposed to.
Galway United were less fortunate, forced to call off their First Division game with the whole first team squad and staff now restricting their movements and awaiting tests, following HSE and Government guidelines.
And after weeks of consoling IRFU emails confirming negative tests for its professional provincial players – even if the club game had been riven with Covid-19 postponements – Munster came to a standstill when it revealed a senior player had returned a positive test.
There have been Covid cases before at the Munster and Ulster academies – where there were eight – but this is the first positive test from a senior player with an Irish province.
All this is a reminder that sport is living with the virus, too. Merely being well-paid professionals in elaborate cocoons offer no impenetrable shield. The virus cannot discriminate between the unwitting consummate professional or the unwilling amateur in Dungarvan.
And if professional sport is not immune, the risks are multiplied amongst amateurs and, thereafter, spectators.
Hence the decision to ban all but professional and elite matches for the rest of this month.
Medical opinion had argued for a ban on all sport but political intervention has ruled that out, for now, at least. But how close is Irish sport to a return to the Armageddon of last spring?
Yesterday’s cluster of alarming news stories sent shock waves through a variety of sporting communities still reeling from a weekend when pockets of the population were scandalised for their reckless exuberance attending
games and celebrations.
Since the summer, there have been thousands upon thousands of games and summer camps and training sessions in all three disciplines and only a minuscule fraction of positive Covid-19 tests have emerged.
Sport has always been one of the safest places to reside if seeking to prevent illness – or avoid it.
But if professional soccer and rugby can unearth high-profile examples in the same day, followed by a confirmed case in the Kerry hurling camp last night, are we in danger of being diverted into another unknown path in these most perilous times?
The Government has invested heavily in ensuring that this year’s championships proceed, buttressing its €40m relief fund for all three major sporting bodies.
Even if the restrictions beginning today form a Government gamble that fails, any step up a level will not see the championship abandoned.
And elite sport, from the PRO14 to Irish internationals in rugby and soccer, will also escape any more culls too.
What they will not survive, however, is a raft of positive tests that renders it impossible to fulfil fixtures.
That is the real nightmare scenario for sport as last night brought continued confirmation that the statistics are maintaining their relentless upward march.
And so, even if NPHET and the Government haggle over what is the right thing to do, every Irish man or woman who loves their sport knows they shouldn’t have to endure a similar struggle. We know what to do.
It’s our game. Whatever the code.
Sport is always one of the safest places to reside if seeking to prevent illness