David Penberthy: Let’s get some perspective on the importance of sport

There may be millions of dollars at stake now that sporting events have been cancelled amid the COVID-19 crisis, but there’s also millions of lives at stake, too, writes David Penberthy.

The prospect of an entire sporting season being held without spectators is not entirely new. The Sheffield Shield has been doing it for years, and the AFL teams GWS and the Gold Coast Suns will enjoy a special edge should they play in stadiums where you can hear a pin drop. My old NRL club the Adelaide Rams did pioneering work in this space back in the late 1990s, with the entire state of South Australia oblivious to its brief existence.

Pardon the cheap gags but in the current climate, if you don’t laugh you’ll cry, I suppose.

There is an elitist view that sport is a meaningless pursuit. I am sure there’s a few beret-wearing Brunswick fine art enthusiasts who are guffawing “get a life, plebs!” into their pinot grigio about the prospect of fans being banned from games, or the footy season being cancelled.

Well, up theirs.

The Gold Coast Suns … no stranger to quiet stadium.

To rework a line from the great Gideon Haigh about his beloved sport of cricket, sport is the most important unimportant endeavour in our lives. Principally and most obviously, this is simply because it is fun. Having some kind of release is crucial to achieving a happy and balanced life. It’s also a shared release, a galvanising community action, where aside from the occasional drama of having to deal with a drunken boor or racist loudmouth, it brings people together in an enjoyable way. At its most profound, sport brings us tales of human strength and bravery, triumph over adversity, and it also gives usually-hostile nations a chance to compete amicably without actually trying to kill each other.

We can look forward to the resumption of sport as we know it some time in the distant future.

Unsurprisingly, the trendies on Twitter were lining up to bag the Prime Minister when he said on Thursday that he was looking forward to attending the footy this weekend.

His comments were derided as indicative of his bogan world view. This was snobby stuff. But the question remains, regardless of whether it’s sport, an outdoor rock concert or a 1000-head dinner at a convention centre, should Australians be erring on the side of caution and avoiding mass public gatherings? And beyond that, should the government be taking the guess work out of it for us all, by simply stopping such events for a while, as is happening in other countries?

Everyone lined up to bag Scott Morrison after his comments.

It felt as if the PM with his footy call was trying to show a degree of chutzpah, in the same way other leaders have done after terror events, where returning on holiday to Bali or ringing the bell at the New York Stock Exchange after 9/11 is a genuine act of defiance against a radical and murderous ethos.

With respect, the PM had a bit of a shocker with his footy call [and following Friday’s major announcements has said he will not attend]. He sounded like he had confused the coronavirus with Islamic State. The difference here is that we are talking about a nasty bug as opposed to a violent ideology; a bug that is simply interested only in replicating itself by infecting people, and which derives no ideological pleasure from altering our way of life. I don’t think the coronavirus will really give a toss either way if we are standing up to it or not, by going to watch the Cronulla Sharks play.

Of everything I have read, the figures that made the greatest impression on me this week were the infection rates in Italy, where as of February 24, 124 people were infected with the virus, which is fewer people than were infected in Australia this week. As of last Thursday, the number of infected Italians stood at 12,462. All because the country adopted a slapdash, business-as-usual approach as the multiplier effect of the virus saw a few isolated cases blow up into a nationwide crisis in record time.

Against this backdrop last Friday’s chaos at the Melbourne Grand Prix stands as one of the greatest failures of planning our nation has recently seen. How utterly irresponsible that the Formula One bosses and the Victorian Government did not actually make a call as to whether spectators could attend or not until the aforementioned spectators were standing outside the track gates at 8.45am Friday. It was reckless beyond belief.

Lewis Hamilton was vocal in his criticism.

And as the F1 champ Lewis Hamilton said so bluntly and eloquently, the race organisers (and possibly the nervous state government) clearly pushed things as far as they could because of one thing and one thing only: Money.

There are, of course, millions of millions of dollars at stake in sport, through memberships, advertising, match day food and drink sales, broadcast rights. But what matters most of all is human safety. To that end, it is hard to see how you could even stage a competition without spectators, as the sporting bodies have even more of a duty of care to their players than they do their fans. The players are their employees.

A friend of mine who runs a suburban footy club was saying that change rooms themselves are like a giant petri dish, be it showering, drinking water, using bandages and tape, and then out on the ground there’s the constant impetus to grab each other. It’s the opposite of safe health practice, impossible to avoid in a physically dangerous contact sport.

Sport might be the most important unimportant activity, but human life is more important than anything else. So bring on the 2021 season. From what I’ve seen from my club in the pre-season matches, 2021 is shaping as a promising year. I’ve just got one question, living in a family that spends all of winter having its life ruled by football.

What the hell do we all talk about now?

@penbo