With Reaction taking a much-needed break over what one can’t quite call the Festive period, the Sports column can say good-bye 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 and committeemen, 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.
