Back to the footballing future would give us all a big boost

IT’S all about the Premier League now. Yes, in our quest to find some way back to the future, the plan to restart the rest of the season in June would be in that sweet spot of risk and reward.

The reward would be an incalculable boost to the mental health of millions of people — this is no longer simply something to be vaguely desired, something that would be nice all the same.

It is crucial to the success of all the international efforts of recent weeks, that in the not-too-distant future, people can turn on the television and find an actual game of football, the result of which they don’t already know.

The Germans, having had a good war against the virus, are hoping to have their football back some time this month — they understand the dynamics of this, the need to avoid drifting into that zone in which large numbers of people just get ornery.

As regards the risks, an elite professional football league would probably be the most controlled environment you could imagine for any such undertaking — even in peacetime, your Premier League clubs have battalions of doctors and physios and medics of every kind, the players truly are a protected species. And yes, even in peacetime, players can get injured, or sick, or worse.

In the perfect scenario, matches would be played behind closed doors, and it would feel like a tournament, with the games on free-to-air TV every day. And the Premier League being a global phenomenon, it would feel almost like a World Cup — with Liverpool winning.

Not that that is of any importance in the greater scheme — in fact I’d almost forgotten they were leading the League by 25 points, so it’s nice to be reminded of that too. The death took place in Belfast last week of Marty Lundy, frontman of the band Katmandu, who were much-loved in Dublin in the early 1980s and who had the distinction of being probably the most sophisticated covers band we have ever seen in this country.

They had their own stuff too, but their musicianship truly came alive when doing razor-sharp versions of

Bowie or Roxy Music. And in Marty Lundy in particular they had someone with a trait unusual in the world of serious musos — he was tremendously witty.

At the Baggot Inn on Sunday nights he might congratulate Evonne Goolagong for winning some tennis match — for no reason except that it sounded funny. Or you might find him beside you at the bar, ordering a pint in the middle of a song.

Katmandu were from Northern Ireland but they weren’t going to be mistaken for The Undertones — they were Steely Dan fans. And their keyboard player, the late and also muchloved maestro Pat ‘Fitzy’ Fitzpatrick, had studied at the Royal London School of Music — alongside Elvis Costello’s piano-man, Steve Nieve. Indeed Paul Cleary of the Blades tells me that he’d go to Katmandu gigs just to see the brilliance of the drummer Peter McKinney, who later played with The Waterboys, as did bassist Trevor Hutchinson.

The voice of Marty doing Heaven by Talking Heads would be perfect for today: “Heaven is a place…a place where nothing ever happens.”