A year of sport without spectators

With Reaction taking a much-needed break over what one can’t quite call the festive period, the Sports column can say goodbye and good riddance to a year we wish we had never experienced. Not even the old line “worse things happen at sea” is much consolation.

Nevertheless, we have some things to be thankful for. Thanks to the efforts of the often-maligned administrators, most sports have contrived to keep going at least at the upper and professional level, though almost entirely in empty grounds without spectators. A lot of amateur sport – community sport as it is now often called – and school sport has suffered worse. We have had no amateur club rugby in Scotland at all and there was no club cricket last summer.

Efforts to keep things going have been extraordinary, with players living in sanitised bubbles. The word “bubble” had taken on new meaning. Indeed, the efforts have been so successful that if you restricted your reading of the sports pages to match results, league tables, racecards and suchlike, you might even suppose that times were normal. There have been a few tiny shuffling steps taken towards a return to normality: a very limited number of spectators admitted to some football grounds and to some of last weekend’s European Rugby Cup games. But seeing, say, a couple of thousand spectators at The Rec in Bath merely emphasizes how many were missing. It looks like being a long time before “away” fans are allowed to travel.

Back early in autumn before the second wave of Covid infections surfaced, it was possible to hope that, come February and March, we might even return to normality for the Six Nations. That hope has withered. It may not be quite dead, but it is looking very sick. The Six Nations will be played, but probably to grounds that are empty or, at best, dotted with a few thousand privileged fans. As for the weekend holiday trips that are so much part of the Six Nations, roll on 2022.

Still, all is not gloom. By the time you read this the First Test between India and Australia will be well underway. Another sign of the times: India’s captain, the great Virat Kohli, will be off home after the First Test because his wife is due to give birth. There was a time when an English cricketer on an Ashes tour would be booking a call home or awaiting a telegram to tell him he had become a father. So India is under added pressure to win this First Test. Not many teams have won a series in Australia coming from behind, though Len Hutton’s England did so in 1954-5, thanks to Frank Tyson and Brian Statham. I suspect Australia have the best team in the world just now, though their batting is very dependent on Steve Smith and Marnus Labuschagne. There is much interest in their new cap, the very tall all-rounder Cameron Green. He bears the burden of having been described as the new Ricky Ponting. Let us hope he doesn’t find this as crushing a burden as several found being hailed the new Don Bradman to be. This First Test is one of these, to my mind unnecessary, pink ball day-night matches. The one thing to be said for them is that, living in the northern hemisphere, you can watch the evening session over your breakfast rather than at 5 or 6 in the morning.

So what else have we to look forward to? In English football we have what, thanks perhaps to the absence of crowds, looks like the most competitive, and therefore unpredictable, Premiership ever. As things stand at the moment of writing (Wednesday) the top two, Spurs and Liverpool, are on 25 points and there are five clubs, 6 to 10 in the table, on 20 points. It’s congested up at the top. Form has been fluctuating, Manchester United, for instance, one of the five on 20, are seemingly finding it much easier to win away rather than at home in Old Trafford.

The first round of rugby’s European Champions Cup was a poor one for English clubs with only Exeter Chiefs and Wasps winning and the other five losing (three of them at home). It was worse still for Scotland, Edinburgh losing at home to La Rochelle and Glasgow being slaughtered by the reigning Champions Exeter Chiefs at Sandy Park. Leinster and Munster both won. The Welsh had mixed fortune: Dragons losing to Wasps, but Scarlets winning at Bath. It was a good weekend for the French with five wins and two defeats. The old notion that French clubs travel badly took a knock, with Toulouse, La Rochelle and Clermont-Auvergne all winning away. Clermont’s win at Bristol, 51-38, was a joy, making Eddie Jones’s complaint about the present laws making running rugby very difficult look pretty silly. How the game is played depends on how teams want to play it. Perhaps the balance in European rugby is swinging back to France, a thought given substance by the performance of the young reserve international side against England at Twickenham in what some sage English scribes had said would be a mismatch. Nevertheless, it will have to be a very good French club which prises the Cup away from Exeter, while Leinster may still be second favourites.

Otherwise, Anthony Joshua’s defeat of a dogged but limited Bulgarian means that it may be as sure as anything that some time next year we shall at last see him in the ring against Tyson Fury, in what has been announced as the greatest-ever fight in the history of British boxing. Certainly, it has been a long journey from the days when British contenders were dismissed in the US as “horizontal heavyweights”. This was a unfair description for the dogged Welshman Tommy Farr who took the great Joe Louis the full fifteen rounds in 1938 when Louis was in his prime. Nevertheless, for me, the greatest night in British Boxing history remains Randolph Turpin’s defeat of Sugar Ray Robinson at Earl’s Court in the summer of 1951. Sugar Ray had lost only one of his 132 fights – that was to “Raging Bull” Jake LaMotta whom however he beat four or five times, but in that Festival of Britain summer it was, as the folk-singer Ewan McColl put it, “the night our Randy/ Beat up that Sugar Candy/ And won the right to wear the Crown.” He lost the return in New York a few months later, but that’s boxing, a grim, brutal, unjustifiable, compelling, occasionally entrancing Sport.