Why sporting affairs are irrelevant in time of crisis - comment

How Bill Shankly’s famous quote resonates during the ongoing crisis.

Clearly football, or indeed any sport, is not more important than life or death, regardless of whether the Liverpool manager said it tongue-in-cheek or otherwise.

In fact, the pandemic highlights just how unimportant sport is in the grand scheme of things, and how many people’s priorities are sadly askew.

Indeed, there are those who simply cannot live without sport to a startling extent; one-dimensionality is an understatement.

The inability of some people to see anything in life apart from sport – as opposed to simply enjoying sport as a part of life – has resonated with me in recent days.

Indeed, you cannot go on Twitter at present (not that I do for very long, considering it is mostly a platform for narcissists and/or ne’er-do-wells) without seeing some cringe-inducing attempts to fill the sporting void.

Granted, some of it is funny, like dogs taking slip catches in makeshift games of back garden cricket, or cats swinging their paws at table tennis balls being rolled towards cardboard boxes serving as makeshift stumps (well, funny inverted commas).

But the sight of football clubs – even my own beloved Lincoln City – live tweeting games from the recent past as though they are being played in the present isn’t just imaginative, creative and void-filling in my view, it’s sad.

Indeed, social media is ablaze with all manner of re-runs of old footage, flashbacks to this, that and the other, polls as to who is your favourite footballer/cricketer/golfer of all time, and so on, while the BBC recently re-ran the entire Headingley Test from last summer.

Sport has only been out of commission for about a month and a half, which makes me wonder how some people are going to cope if this drags on for several months.

The common theme running through all the diet of re-runs and time-filling is that people are apparently so bored that they have nothing else to do.

One of life’s great crimes is being bored, even in lockdown, and the idea of listening back to the entire Headingley Test, as thrilling as it was, seems a spectacular waste of time.

Yet, everywhere you look and listen, there are people out mowing their gardens day after day, embarking on yet more DIY that doesn’t need doing, and desperately trying to fill in the hours.

I can’t pretend that my own life is so fascinating and diversified that I cannot sympathise to some degree, but I think I could do a bit better than that.

If there is one positive to come out of this crisis sports-wise, perhaps it will be that more people view sport in its proper perspective.

Although I must confess I’m not holding my breath.

Even too much sporting discussion seems unfitting at present; even more so the inane clips of bored and vastly remunerated footballers on Sky Sports News mucking about in their mansions while presenters smile as though it’s the funniest thing on earth.

Trust me, it really isn’t.

I don’t know about you, but I can’t watch these buffoons (the footballers) without thinking of all the NHS staff working night and day.

This is not the time for childish levity – particularly when it comes from the overpaid and often out-of-touch.

“Should the football season be scrapped?” the conversation goes on and on to the point of tedium.

Who cares.

“Should cricket’s new 100-ball competition be postponed until next year?”

Again, it’s not important.

Who gives a fig whether Don Bradman was a better batsman than Viv Richards, or Harold Larwood a better fast bowler than Fred Trueman, or whatever Twitter poll is dreamt up next.

As Rhett Butler famously told Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With The Wind: “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.”

It might seem counterintuitive for a sports writer to say so, but I haven’t missed the absence of live sport particularly.

Granted, I wouldn’t mind popping down to Sincil Bank to see Lincoln City’s latest defeat were it possible, but it’s quite nice to have a break from the endless glut of action and the complete lack of perspective that surrounds modern sport.

For perspective has gone amid the constant diet of football on television, the round-the-clock sports news, the absurd relevance given to football manager’s press conferences, and so on.

Suddenly, Jose Mourinho’s opinions, for example, are exactly what they always were in the first place – no more valid or interesting than anybody else’s.

Sport matters, but only in its right and proper place.

It is great entertainment, glorious escapism, and a way of bringing people and communities together.

But the lack of live sport is forcing us to confront our attitude towards it, and the importance that we place on sport as a society – and the lack of importance that we give to the true heroes of society such as those who work in the caring professions.

For some, the lack of live sport is no doubt bringing the uncomfortable realisation that, without it and/or Twitter, they are, as people, empty shells.