Nothing to do but play waiting game
NOTHER day another postponement or cancellation. It seems a long time ago now since the fifth round of the National Football League was postponed and a few Champions League games were played behind closed doors. Back then we were trying to understand what social distancing meant and worrying about getting our hands on hand sanitiser; we were harrumphing about a horse racing festival in the West Country and wondering would the pubs re-open for St Patrick’s Day so we could quench our two-day old thirst.
It all seems a bit quaint now, a little over a week later, doesn’t it? In just over a week the death toll in Italy continues to climb in an unimaginably steep line, and the enduring images of the week were those of convoys of army vehicles in Lombardy taking the dead to crematoriums. The numbers of positive cases of Covid-19 in Ireland are on the rise, and the death toll in the Republic from Coronavirus was at six by Tuesday afternoon.
With more cases of the virus in this country comes the need for more social distancing measures, and the need for more closures of businesses to try to keep people apart and safe.
Mother’s Day last Sunday saw a nation of children and grandchildren telling their mammies how much they loved them through windows and locked patio doors. It was heartbreaking to see pictures of kids pressing their noses to glass with granny on the other side with a tear in her eye and yearning for a hug or a kiss. And then we had to juxtapose those images with a line of people cheek to jowl in Howth queueing for fish and chips. If the Coronavirus doesn’t take them one imagines starvation will, if they’re that hard pressed for a cod and single in the middle of a pandemic.
You’d think the message would be getting through by now: stay at home, people! It’s hard but it’s simple: stay indoors as much as possible and stay away from each other. Short-term pain for long-term gain.
It puts the business of sport into perspective but it doesn’t make it any easier. There’s only so much GAA Gold one can watch. Last week eir Sport did their bit for the self-isolating people of Offaly by giving the 1982 All-Ireland Final a re-run, though quite what it did for the people of Kerry I’m not sure. If Tommy Doyle and Charlie Nelligan weren’t already isolating in the hotpress they were by the time Seamus Darby began to swing those hips.
I don’t have Sky Sports, but I’m aware that on quieter days they fire out the Premier League Years programmes, whereby they raid the archives and throw up an hour or two package of the 1993/94 season or whatever. As a Liverpool supporter there would have been slim pickings in that particular orchard anyway (seeing as Sky think football only started in 1992), but I’m not even sure Man United fans can sit through the Premier Years stuff day in day out at this stage.
Horseracing has been about the only sport to survive up to now (and that’s to stop now under tighter restrictions announced by the Government on Tuesday) but how many of us can really get enthused about a Monday meeting in
Naas, especially with the bitter taste of Cheltenham still lingering at the back of our throat?
One by one they have fallen. The Ladies Gaelic Football Association on Tuesday officially cancelled the remained of their National League. The GAA itself is expected to make a similar pronouncement on its Allianz Football and Hurling Leagues.
UEFA has postponed the Champions League and Europa League finals indefinitely. The USPGA golf tournament has, like the US Masters, had a line drawn through it for the time being.
The University Boat Race in April will not go ahead. Neither, of course, will the Giro d’Italia.
And the latest and biggest of all is the news that the 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo will now become the 2021 Olympic Games.
In a joint statement of the bleeding obvious, the organisers of Tokyo 2020 and the IOC said: “In the present circumstances and based on the information provided by the WHO today [Tuesday], the IOC president and the prime minister of Japan have concluded that the Games of the XXXII Olympiad in Tokyo must be rescheduled to a date beyond 2020 but not later than summer 2021, to safeguard the health of the athletes, everybody involved in the Olympic Games and the international community.”
As it stands some of the biggest sporting events in the world, due to take place in 2020, have been shelved and put back to 2021. Others have postponed events and will hope to reschedule later in the year. Others are keeping in line with the national guidelines and adhering to the restrictions as and when they are given.
Closer to home the GAA, the League of Ireland, and every other sports governing body is adopting a wait-and-see approach. They’re doing what needs to be done in the interests of public health and safety, the greater good, and then their own interests. Without a healthy people there will be no return to sport. In these surreal and worrying times, in this time of no actual sport going on, all any of us can do – sports enthusiasts or not – is play the waiting game.