All we really have is known unknowns

WE wouldn’t be the biggest fan of Donald Rumsfeld we have to say. He was a vainglorious, caviller cowboy, whose failure to properly plan for the occupation of Iraq cost hundreds of thousands of lives (at least) and spread an instability throughout the region that’s still with us to this very day.

Rumsfeld did, however, give us something quite valuable with his famous known unknowns speech. While the situation in Iraq was deteriorating rapidly, the then US Secretary of Defence said that: “there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know.” If ever a turn of phrase was applicable to the moment then this is it. There are things we know. We know that COVID-19 has reached these shores; we know (roughly) how many people are contracting it; we know how many people have died from it; we know that we’re going to be on this most severe phase of the lockdown for another three or so weeks. After that all bets are off.

We know we don’t know if our efforts to date will be as successful as we would like them to be (the indications are that it’s working). We don’t know what will happen after that beyond Minster for Health Simon Harris saying that social distancing is with us until a vaccine arrives (and by the way we don’t know precisely when that will be either). Nor do we know what exactly this social distancing will entail. What sorts of gatherings will be permitted? What sorts of businesses will be able to reopen and when? We don’t know when and in what order this will happen either.

That’s just scratching the surface of the things we know we don’t know (will there be a second wave for instance?) and not even touching on the things we don’t know we don’t know (for obvious reasons). This, for better or for worse, is the world we live in now. We have to get used to it. It’s understandable to crave an end-point for all of this, it’s understandable to want a neat time-frame for when things might happen, but that’s just not possible right now. We can understand the frustrations for players and managers wanting to get a roadmap back to action, but there honestly doesn’t seem much point in pushing Croke Park for more clarity as the GPA seems to wants to do. Not now in the fog of war.