Awake at 4am, twisting and turning, I gave up my attempt to get back to sleep and headed to the local park for an early morning walk. Its a route I’ve walked over a hundred times during lockdown and this one was little different to the others. Fleeced up to the neck, woollen beany hat on, waterproof coat to promote a good sweat and a podcast for company. This was just another Coronavirus walk, one of the many new routines we have all discovered we need to maintain a little bit of sanity.
Half-way round my first circuit, I came across a child’s shoe. Easily sidestepped, it didn’t detain me nor disturb my concentration on my podcast. On my second circuit, I anticipated its appearance. Upturned, its patterned white sole disguised the faded pink fluffy adornments on its velcro fastening straps. It was so small (for a two year old at a guess) and looked so lost without its pair. The worn heel band had revealed the foam innards of the shoe, like the last fish on sale in the fishmongers. I had thought picking it up could represent an infection risk but the stronger impulse was to place it aside, fluffy adornments righted and facing the world, in the hope that it might be easier for the parent or toddler who owned it to find . . .
And so to the return of live sport. The Premier League has been up and running since 17th June, with games covered live almost every day since, it seems. Tomorrow, England will face the West Indies at the Ageas Bowl, the players having been ensconced in a ‘bio-bubble’ for some time. Tuffers and Vaughan, BBCs headline cricket observers, oozed excitement on their podcast at the prospect of a return of international cricket. Their protestations felt a little bit like listening to cabinet ministers during the lockdown constantly re-iterating the governments approach of ‘ramping up’ their testing regime in the belief that the more you repeat a message the more believable it becomes. I am not excited.
If the football experience is anything to go by, live cricket will be the sporting equivalent of a bland Sunday lunch; dull, colourless and tasteless. And the missing ingredient ? The crowd, of course. The need to protect everyone against this vile virus has, understandably, determined the response of all the major sports. But there has been little recognition in all of their plans and risk assessments of the importance of spectators to the modern sporting contest and how diminished those contests are without them. Fake crowd noise, cardboard cut outs and supine commentary don't make up for the lack of an atmosphere.
If I think of any electrifying sporting moment, it represents a relationship between crowd, commentator and players that is as unbreakable as the laws of physics. Kenneth Wolstenhome could not have excitedly exclaimed his memorable phrase without spectators who thought it was all over. Cliff Morgan’s ‘A dramatic start! What a score!!' as Gareth Edwards dived over the try line would never have been said without the intervention of the crowd at Wales’ National Stadium, a cauldron of rugby passion.
And two moments from last years wonderful Summer of cricket were branded onto our souls with the sounds of the crowd. I am sure there have been mighty tomes written about the influence of spectators on sporting performance. Let’s go as far as to say that without the raucous insistence of those at Lords and Headingley, Ben Stokes would not have manufactured those match winning performances. Sport is a contest. A contest is a performance. Performance implies an audience.
Sport and spectators are also fused in a cultural connection that goes much deeper than the winning of a particular match or contest. A comparison here may assist. Having got the agreement of eight first-class counties to play them in the 1921 season, Glamorgan County Cricket Clubs first fixture in the County Championship took place against Sussex at Cardiff Arms Park in late May 1921. A victory brought what local paper The Western Mail described as ‘a mild stampede’ to the Pavillion where both ‘captains were overwhelmed with congratulations.’ [1]
Thousands of miles away and five years later in Bombay, a Hindu representative eleven played against a touring MCC side. The game is not remembered for the result, a draw, but for an innings by C.K. Nayudu, who dismantled the MCC attack, scoring 153. The Indian crowd of 25,000 beat drums, sang songs and flew kites in the stand. After the game, the Hindu cricketers were honoured with two separate celebrations demonstrating the country’s thanks for what the Indian National Herald had asked for before the game which was for them ‘. . . to resist the invaders.’ [2]
So here was a nascent, aspirant patriotism using the game of cricket as a jumping off point for an expression of national pride and defiance. The Welsh crowd, by comparison far smaller and far more sedate, showed that the Welsh had arrived in the first-class game but really had no desire to take things any further, on either the cricketing or political fronts. This is the crowd and the contest as political litmus tests revealing the truer nature of a cultural moment in time.
Before you leave, take another look at that shoe. It may provoke feelings of sadness or it may provoke nothing at all but there is no argument that it doesn’t look right and it will not do so until it is restored to its other, to make a pair, and its owner, to whose tiny feet it belongs. The return of elite sport may be portrayed as a slow and safe attempt re-introduce us to the games that we love but let’s not kid ourselves. Modern sport owes its existence to the huge sums of money invested by corporate interests whose major expectation is the TV coverage that goes along with it. The ECBs plan to introduce The Hundred competition had paid for itself before even one new spectator had set foot inside a cricket ground. It may be that some sports will come to think that sport may not be able to survive without TV, but it could possibly do so without spectators.
Sport has returned to our TV screens but it is really nothing more than moving a child’s shoe. It is not sport as it is meant to be; a gladiatorial meeting point of the seething, broiling emotions that reinforce our sense of local and national identity.
There’s nothing to see here. Move along now please.