Sport returns but the absence of a crowd matters

So we creep back towards normality but it still seems strange. Rory McIlroy holes a putt for a birdie, and there is silence instead of the usual roar of approval. The Queen has a winner at Royal Ascot and for the first time in her reign she can’t be there. Premier League football is back and grounds are empty while a government minister urges fans to watch televised matches at home rather than in public places. All this is strange and for many sad, though not half as sad as a wry observation this week from the West Indies cricket captain, the admirable Jason Holder.  He said his players wouldn’t be fazed at having to play their Test matches this summer in empty grounds because they are quite accustomed to this at home where the fans no longer flock to Test matches as they did in days past.

Still we had better all get used to the post-Covid restrictions, players and fans alike. It shouldn’t be too difficult. Even Premier League footballers have all in their younger days played at grounds where two men and their dogs might be counted as a crowd. Most sport is played without spectators or when the only spectators are parents, boyfriends or girlfriends. On the subsidiary golf tours, for example, occasional TV coverage makes it clear that players are unlikely to have their concentration broken by any ripple of applause from the neighbouring fairway. Often the poor guys don’t even have caddies and have to lug their own trolleys about.

This being so, not many sportsmen will surely have much sympathy with Novak Djokovic’s indignant response to the news that, if the US tennis Championships are able to be staged, players will not be allowed to have their usual entourage, only one member of the team being permitted courtside. Given that Djokovic usually comes across as an intelligent chap, his objection was surprising. Most tennis players can’t afford to be accompanied by what the top ones call their “team”. Perhaps Djokovic has forgotten how other people live, forgotten how it was for himself indeed when he was young and starting out.

Setting that aside, it’s obvious that professionals at the upper levels of a sport are going to find the absence of crowds disconcerting. A match or event may be important, but it’s the crowd that makes it an occasion. It’s difficult to imagine a Heavyweight title fight taking place in an empty and therefore silent arena. When the typhoon struck Japan during the Rugby World Cup last year, there was a suggestion that the storm damage might make stadia unsafe for spectators and that matches might have to be played behind closed doors.

Everyone felt this would seem wrong and devalue the occasion; fortunately it didn’t happen.

How much difference does the absence of a crowd make? More of us now watch more sport on television or a phone than in the flesh. I suppose that for every match at Wembley or Twickenham, Lord’s or Wimbledon, there may be a hundred times as many socially distant as present at the ground. Yet even those of us watching remotely will probably be influenced by the atmosphere generated by those who are physically there. If, even today, so many years on, you may feel the hairs rise on the back of your neck when David Sole led the Scotland team out at a slow walk in the Grand Slam match at Murrayfield, this surely wouldn’t be the case if you weren’t aware of the atmosphere generated by the huge crowd there as it happened. So the feeling of those present can be mysteriously transmitted to those watching elsewhere and even at another time; and this is something we will be denied and will feel the lack of in the weeks and months ahead.

Of course tension can be generated when there is no crowd or only a very small one. We all know that from our experience of watching school sport or amateur sport. Chance may mean this sometimes happens even in top or international sport. One of the tensest and most compelling hours I have ever experienced as a spectator was at The Oval in 1968. Australia had gone into lunch at 86 for 5 more than 200 runs behind, and facing what seemed certain defeat. A thunderstorm flooded the playing area. Ground staff, helped by a number of spectators mopped up. Play resumed about a quarter to five, stumps due at six o’clock.  My memory is that most of the crowd had given up and headed for home or the pub when the ground became a lake – no, probably not for the pub, licensing laws being what they were then, pubs were still shut in the afternoon – and only a few hundreds of us remained. Nevertheless the rapt silence as Derek Underwood worked his way through the lower Australian order was gripping, until relieved when he took the last wicket. I doubt whether it could have mattered to those watching on television that there were so few actually at The Oval to see it.

Still in the months to come we’ll find out how much the absence of a crowd matters. Oddly I suspect it may matter more to those of us watching remotely than it will to players. But someday we will be allowed back and then some at least may recover the sense of excited anticipation we knew as children, a sense that the years may have withered and custom staled. It will be a renaissance moment.