It’s okay to still care who won the league
HOW could you possibly care about something so trivial at a time like this? People are literally dying right now in this very moment and you’re concerned about who won the Premier League? You’re worried about what this will mean for the All Ireland Championships? How selfish? How crass? How natural? How human? How understandable the need to cling onto some sense of who you are and what you care about when all the world is turning upside down in front of your very eyes? How right and proper it is we give ourselves the mental space to think about something other than COVID-19?
We can understand the sentiment that we ought to focus on the things that really matter, what can be done, individually and collectively, to save as many lives as possible and we should and we must. Nobody sensible would suggest otherwise, but that doesn’t mean the things that mattered to us before don’t matter now or won’t matter again. Life is for living. Life is for us to take what we can out of it. While we’re in this period of lock-down or at least quasi lock-down, it’s the thought of life beyond that will sustain us. That will mean many different things to many different people and, yes, for a lot of people that will mean sport.
That means worrying and wondering what might happen to Liverpool’s title push. Will it mean they’re handed the title? Will it mean – heaven forbid – that the season is annulled? It means wondering about what this might mean for the All Ireland championships.
Might it mean we end up with some sort of a straight knock-out All Ireland championship structure? Might it mean we revert to the old pre-qualifier status quo? Might it mean that whenever Cork and Kerry finally do line out in Páirc Uí Chaoimh in the Munster championship it will be a game with everything on the line?
There’s nothing wrong with being excited by the prospect of it being like the summers of yore when we rocked up to the Páirc or the Stadium and Cork and Kerry did battle with no safety-net. Páidí and Larry stalking the sidelines. Geeing themselves, their teams, the crowd and, ultimately, each other up.
It was glorious then and it can be glorious again. Just the thought of it stirs the blood, well it does for us anyway and there’s nothing wrong with that. Wallowing in our collective misery and misfortune will get us nowhere. We have to look beyond. That’s the whole point of everything we’re doing and sacrificing now.