Premier League should lead the way in getting fans back into sport - Nick Westby

The 2,500 racegoers who wore masks and obeyed social distancing measures at Doncaster Racecourse for the first day of the St Leger meeting, were suddenly made to feel like imposters and rule-breakers.

The experiment was quickly abandoned and there were no punters allowed in for the action on Thursday, Friday or Saturday.

Racing, as it had been since June 1, went back behind closed doors.

But the racing authorities should not be damned for trying. No sporting body should be.

World Snooker tried hosting its World Championships with fans in attendance at the Crucible. A handful were present for day one on Friday, July 31, but just as with the racing, the game had to take a step back and go behind closed doors per a tightening of Government restrictions and could only re-permit a few hundred fans in for the final two weeks later.

Sport is desperate for its paying punters to come back or many more months like this as the nights draw in and temperatures plummet, and we might not have a full sporting landscape by the time Spring returns. The coronavirus pandemic is awful, has claimed many thousands of lives and the number of cases is back on the rise following the easing of lockdown. But, it has also crippled the economy, and with it the billion-pound sporting economy because with no fans paying to watch, clubs and organisations have lost their primary source of income.

They are desperate to get back to some sort of normal, and so they should be.

Even as the R-rate of infection rises, sports should be permitted to keep trying to find a way to get paying punters back, within the Covid guidelines of course.

The Premier League kicked off this weekend with an absolute barnburner of a game between Liverpool and Leeds – but as has been the case since football in England returned in mid-June, there were no fans present to witness it.

Covid protocols remain so strict in fact, that even the media is being restricted. Of the four requests for accreditation for journalists and photographers from The Yorkshire Post and our sister publication the Yorkshire Evening Post to attend at Anfield, only one was accepted.

Are we not at the stage yet where two reporters from Yorkshire can’t take their temperature before they set off, drive over the Pennines, take their temperature on arrival at the stadium, sign the Covid guidelines, take up their allotted seat in an empty stand or even hospitality box, cover the game, talk or interact to no-one, cover the press conference on Zoom and then drive home?

Football needs to lead the way. Where football led in June, other sports followed. It needs to do so again.

In non-league football they are experimenting with a mere hundreds of fans returning. Surely in the Premier League now we’re at the stage where we can get 5,000 fans into a ground.

It has been mooted for Arsenal v Sheffield United on the first Saturday of October, but the way things are going, the caution – understandble, of course – that is being shown by Government may well see that experiment abandoned.

Last week, Richard Masters, the chief executive of the Premier League, warned the game will lose £100m for every month that passes without fans at games. It is a stark warning that will hit the lower leagues harder than most – those clubs not protected by lucrative broadcast rights deals.

Okay, if that is the case, then the Premier League and the EFL need to act. They managed to get footballers back playing safely in June, now let those governing bodies lead the way in getting fans back into stadiums.

They have to be allowed to try. There will be setbacks as we saw with Doncaster’s St Leger meeting, when a sport is forced back to the drawing board, but if we do not try then the gathering financial black hole will start to consume entire sports.

The fight for survival is not exclusive to professional clubs or sports, either.

These are dilemmas facing clubs and organisations across the great sporting spectrum.

Village cricket came back in July and team sports have survived the latest round of measures which means that from today, groups of more than six people are not allowed to socialise.

They are measures that forced the organisers of the Ian Woosnam Senior Golf Classic at Ilkley Golf Club tomorrow and Wednesday to question whether the event should go ahead at all. They have decided in the end to proceed, without – as planned all along – spectators and with strict social distancing guidelines in place.

Good decision. Don’t be afraid to try.

Just like schools reopening for pupils and restaurants re-opening for punters, we’ve got to try and get the economy moving again or it never will.

We’ve got to try to get the sporting world turning again, or it might never do so as we once took for granted. Golf’s 2020protour was the first sporting event to return in Yorkshire on June 8 and has successfully staged up to 10 events across the county without fans but with its protagonists respecting the guidelines.

We have a duty of care to follow and respect the guidelines, but we must also learn to adapt, and not give in.

Whether it’s a famous racing event at Doncaster, a Premier League game with a few thousand fans, snooker’s World Championships or a senior golf event with no fans – sport should not be condemned for trying.