This article is a preview from the autumn 2020 edition of New Humanist
March is usually my favourite month. As a follower of Australian Rules football who lives in the northern hemisphere, I feel like I get a double dose of spring. As clocks go forward and the garden bursts into life, a different kind of new season, vital with promise, blossoms on BT Sport. For football fans back in the old country, the annual resumption of the game is a compensation for encroaching cold and dark. For me, it’s an accelerant of warmth and light. My excitement as the first games impend, usually around the last weekend of March, falls not far short of building myself a custom-designed advent calendar.
Not this year, though. For reasons requiring no reiteration, the Australian Football League suspended play after one surreal, anxious weekend of shortened games played in empty stadiums. Most sports leagues around the world began similar furloughs around the same time. The scale of the derangement felt by many can be gauged from the global mania which erupted for the generally little-regarded Belarusian Premier League, which continued with its scheduled fixture. This was encouraged by Belarusian president Aleksandr Lukashenko, who maintained that Covid-19 was nothing that could not be beaten by regular doses of vodka, sauna sessions and tractor outings. (On the available evidence, he appears to be incorrect.)
Any fans of any sports will have experienced similar disorientation these last few months, akin to the sun ceasing to rise or set, and just sort of hovering interminably at dusk. It was especially cruel that the sporting calendar should be thrown into such disarray in a leap year, shearing summer of both a major international football tournament and an Olympic Games. This disrupted not merely any sports fan’s one-year cycle, but their two-year and four-year cycles.
It’s not just sport, it’s what sport anchors us to. We remember not just the games, but what else was going on in our lives when they happened – where we watched them, who we watched them with, the conversations we had about them afterwards. There’s no way to write what I’m about to write without it sounding patronising to some and treacherous to others, so I’m just going to run with it. As an Australian living in London, I should have been mortified, last summer, by Ben Stokes’s astounding innings to win the Third Ashes Test for England at Headingley from an impossible position. But what I remember, and fondly, is subsequently discussing Stokes’s heroics with English friends, all of us revelling in sport’s ability to furnish stories which no author of fiction would dare invent, for fear of being jeered into oblivion as a corny, heartstring-twanging hack. A whole summer of that, gone.
Sports broadcasters have attempted to fill this gap in the lives of their audiences, and in their own schedules, with replays of classic old games, but however objectively splendid a spectacle they may be, they’re difficult to buy into completely. Even if you don’t know or can’t recall the result, there’s the nagging sense that someone, somewhere does – that the contest you’re watching has been decided, and that the exertions unfolding on the screen are therefore irrelevant. Sport is a drama in which the conclusion is learned by the players and the audience at the same time, which is why nobody has ever leapt from their theatre seat to cheer on MacDuff.
It is also one of very few spectacles one can consume in the near-certain knowledge that one isn’t being lied to. Sport is a coldy objective arbiter of excellence. While it is as true of sports as anything else that being born lucky doesn’t hurt, it is more true of sports than anything else that luck will only get you so far. Certainly on the upper reaches of sport’s hierarchy, it doesn’t matter where you went to school, who your parents are or how gleaming your smile is. You can run the 100 metres in under ten seconds, or not. You can throw an American football 50 yards onto the chest of a sprinting receiver while several hundred kilograms of defensive line descends on you, or not.
This is at least part of the reason that, while I have my favourite sports, and my partisan loyalties within them, I will watch more or less anything. (Except golf, obviously.) A contest between teams I don’t care about, in a sport I take little interest in, is as close as I get to meditation – a gently centring reminder that the universe is, by and large, not about you, that you are but one of many striving to do the best they can at whatever their thing is.
I also contend, and not exclusively to justify the time I spend watching sport, that it’s educational. Any quirk of team iconography that attracts the attention can prompt improving online searches. I perhaps now know more about Belarus, and care more about the fortunes of FC Torpedo-BelAZ Zhodino, than I might have without the intervention of Covid-19, but this is meagre consolation.
The Australian Football League resumed in mid-June, once more in largely empty stadia, although with tentative plans to reintroduce crowds gradually. Sports leagues around the world are undertaking similar cautious emergences from hibernation. As chance had it, the second game back was Geelong versus Hawthorn. Geelong are my team, Hawthorn our bitterest rivals, and this would usually be an event during which even firefighters intent on dousing a blaze in my kitchen would be asked if they could wait. But it was strangely hard to get into, and I’m someone who would normally find nothing easier to get into than Geelong wiping the deck with Hawthorn. The absence of a live crowd was weird, the canned applause was weird, and the fact that Round Two was being played in mid-June was incomprehensible. Everything felt wrong. It still does, and it will for a while. I can’t even muster much enthusiasm for the arguments which will consume sports fans when or if things return to normal – whether seasons delayed or truncated by Covid-19 are somehow devalued, whether trophies won and medals earned during these peculiar times should forever be tarnished with an asterisk.
Any honest sports fan also has to acknowledge the existential angst attendant upon watching, on television, a spectacle being observed by nobody in real life. We are being forced into an uncomfortable confrontation of the dismissal of sport often made by non-sports watchers: that it’s just a bunch of blokes chasing a ball around a paddock. When there’s no crowd at the match, and the game has become so detached from its normal rhythms, uncoupled from its usual measures of success, and disconnected from its history, it kind of is just a bunch of blokes chasing a ball around a paddock.
The great escape offered by sport is that it’s an unserious thing that we’re allowed to take seriously. During most crises, it would be a solace. Now, it’s just another reminder of how gruesome things are. It is far from the greatest grief caused by Covid-19, but grief it is, nevertheless.
