Coronavirus: Game on, with ‘little sport’ leading the way

Big sport is on its way back. But some Australians aren’t waiting for the professionals to sort themselves.

Lockdown has left many of us bursting with the sporting impulse. Picture: Stuart McEvoy

So there we were last week, four clubmates on a bright, crisp autumn morning in Melbourne, bearing cricket gear, two sets of metal stumps and a bag of vintage balls towards some suburban nets.

Reuniting for the first time since lockdown abated were El Scuzzo (left-handed guitarist, left-arm tweaker), Harry (six-hitting Sikh Uber driver) and DJ (roadworker with a flair for quizzical medium pace and 1970s tracksuits). And me, because mediocrity never sleeps, right?

None of us in form exactly, ­although I was coming off 300 not out in the kitchen the night before. All of us feeling a little self-­conscious, ­eschewing the usual handshakes and keeping our ­saliva to ­ourselves, not that it was worth wasting on the piebald ­practice balls.

Over us shone a wan sun; around us were other flurries such as kick-to-kick, a tai chi troop and council groundskeepers.

There was ample groaning about underused or in my case non-existent musculature; but also a general sense of wellbeing from the restoration of the routine and familiar to these routineless and unfamiliar times.

Big sport, as we’re reminded by daily headlines, is on its way back, here and abroad: South Korea’s KBO League led the way on Tuesday; the Bundesliga begins tonight. Football in Australia is a fortnight away, presented with the air of a national award for being good.

But for once, big sport proceeds in arrears of little sport, which tentatively restarted last week with the relaxation of the lockdown, guided by the Australian ­Institute of Sport’s Framework for Rebooting Community Sport. As Scott Morrison put it a ­fortnight ago: “It’s important that people should be able to see the sport, but they should be able to play it as well.”

It’s the totality of restrictions that has accentuated the extraordinariness of these times. Big sport has been intermittently curtailed by war and catastrophe. But not since the very earliest days of white settlement has Australia been so devoid of all sport as during the national coronavirus response, which emptied great arenas, suburban ovals, bowling greens, local tennis courts, gymnasia and playgrounds alike.

Sport, in fact, has commonly been embraced as a solace amid suffering and adversity. How did we mark summer’s bushfires? We played a celebrity cricket game and a state of origin Aussie rules match for charity; athletes were at the forefront of donors.

Detail from The Cricketers (1948) by Russell Drysdale. Picture: Private collection Estate of Russell Drysdale.

A hive of inactivity

Yet for the past couple of months sport has been powerless to “bring us together”, because this was precisely what COVID-19 precluded. We showed our solidarity by remaining apart.

Even a century ago during the flu epidemic, which has come into its own as a yardstick of comparison, restrictions were less extreme. Quarantine caused cancellation of two interstate cricket matches, but brief local bans on outdoor activities left recreations largely unimpaired. Football codes got in full seasons.

This time big sport was one of the first sacrifices, with national football competitions unviable in the face of impermeable interstate borders and rigid social distancing.

And little sport followed suit, for reasons less immediately compelling — the cessation was arguably more part of the general curtailment of mobility, and also a statement of seriousness. Soon enough, anyway, Australia was a hive of inactivity.

Not, however, inertia. The physical expression sport usually offers found an outlet in the permission of daily exertion of some kind. Never have walking tracks and cycle paths seemed so busy, so bursting with the latent sporting impulse.

One saw solo tennis and hockey being played against walls. Stationary cycles and backyard trampolines proved their worth. Dogs were walked and dumbbells wielded with pent-up zeal.

It was a triumph of sorts for an older public-health message about the psychological efficacy of regular exercise. Zoom meetings provided an incentive to get moving that regular meetings did not.

While gun-toting Americans thronged state halls to campaign for their constitutional right to ­lethal infection, here the most ­conspicuous campaign of civil disobedience was in the name of freedom of recreational golf led by a former footballer.

Big sport, meanwhile, became an existential spectacle. Could it adapt? Would it even survive? The rivalry of the football codes, always in the background, loomed into the foreground. They belied their national statuses by falling back on stereotypes.

The National Rugby League from Sydney surged headlong behind a charismatic chairman who shrugged off his chief executive; the Australian Football League in Melbourne proceeded cautiously behind a technocratic chief executive whose chairman was nowhere to be seen.

Part of this was structurally driven. The NRL, with negligible reserves, needed like a shark to keep moving; the AFL, with the asset of Marvel Stadium to secure a $600m credit facility, enjoyed greater flexibility. But it also seemed to reflect Sydney’s affinity for the hard-charging individual and Melbourne’s for the well-groomed network.

Ever bigger, ever more

An utterly unsurprising development was that some bored and frustrated footballers flouted the lockdown. Surprising was that the overwhelming majority of young men with too much money and too little to do observed it. Now if Nathan Cleary can just stay off TikTok for a fortnight …

Other sports, meanwhile, succumbed to pre-existing weaknesses. For decades, big sport in Australia has extended itself on the Never Never, spending the money it then set out to earn, ­operating on the expectation of ever bigger, always more.

The sudden unforeseen ­prospect of less left Football Federation Australia looking increasingly friendless, and Rugby Australia barely distinguishable from a hole in the ground.

Cricket Australia should have been best positioned to ride the ­crisis out, as a prestigious non-contact sport with ample reserves and long-term commercial partners whose season COVID-19 barely brushed.

But self-fulfilling prophecies of financial vulnerability and retrograde austerities soon exposed the weakness of its governance.

The leadership of Cricket Victoria recalled Douglas Adams’s description in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy of Zaphod Beeblebrox, who allegedly went to pieces so fast that onlookers had to duck the shrapnel.

Most vulnerable least fairly have been the fledgling female professional leagues, which have been such gratifying beneficiaries of sport’s 21st-century prosperity. Their growth, however, had remained somewhat dependent on that prosperity’s continuation.

If, as some predict, COVID-19’s long-term impact portends a fundamental reset of the sporting economy, then the potential for women’s professional sport to be last in and first out is real indeed.

This country has made itself a destination of choice for women’s international sport: following the success of the T20 World Cup in March, Australia will host a basketball World Cup in 2022, and maybe a football World Cup in 2023. (Australia has bid jointly with New Zealand.)

For broadcasters and sponsors, however, sport looks increasingly like a buyers’ market, while the backstop of the state will have other priorities.

In years to come, it may well be asked: what was it like? After all, this has been the Australia of which intellectuals and aesthetes have long fantasised, undistracted by what Donald Horne called “the one national institution that has had no knockers” and Barry Humphries deemed “a loathsome and dangerous pursuit”.

It was strange to be sure. Suddenly an industry with nothing to sell, a good deal of big sport could be seen for what it is: much ado about the mostly ephemeral.

Large men sat on couches and at desks in front of television cameras saying more and more about less and less until they had described everything about nothing.

Evening television news bulletins gaped with sport slots for games not happening and competitions going nowhere. These were filled with athletes discoursing about how great it would be when eventually they had something to talk about.

Journalists toiled with ever greater desperation, compiling listicles, surveying memes, scraping the bottoms of various clickbait barrels.

Survivors at Fox Sports were last week reduced to: “Matty Johns reveals Panthers great and former Triple M colleague Mark Geyer farted on Mark Wahlberg seconds before recording an interview for the Grill Team.” Who needs The Last Dance for nostalgia, eh?

A cohort of fans, no doubt, craved their weekly indulgence like crazy, not least for giving structure to a calendar now stuck on Blursday.

There was the melancholy thought of scarfs unworn, vacuum flasks unfilled, pilgrimages untaken, club songs unsung.

But did we miss big sport as much as might have been assumed in advance? People seemed to accept the deprivation in the spirit of a Lenten sacrifice. It’s not as if anyone else was enjoying sport. There was a unity in renunciation.

One felt sympathy for the dedicated athletes, but did anyone care all that much when the Olympics were deferred? For decades it has been drummed into us that the Games are integral to our national self-image. Let’s just say that the image appeared to survive postponement relatively unscathed.

Nobody took any pleasure in those few cricket and football fixtures played under biosecure conditions before the boom finally descended. The AFL’s first round ratings tailed off markedly, the undertone of initial comment seeming to be that one might as well not bother.

Even while watching at home, the knowledge of the existence of a live crowd lends itself to a feeling of communion. Silence is correspondingly isolating.

People, together

We will shortly have a second chance to get used to it, perhaps in a slightly better mood, perhaps more amenable to innovation. The KBO League restarted last week with stands occupied by life-size cardboard cut-out fans. Anyone for Football Cardboard Wars?

At any rate, biosecurity establishes another linkage, however temporary, between big sport and little sport. There will be as many live spectators for the first round of the NRL season on May 28 as there were at my last club match.

So what about those clubs? Morrison’s government has, of course, shown considerable appreciation of little sport — that played in marginal electorates at any rate. Alas, we can’t all be as meritorious as Yankalilla Bowling Club.

But sport’s “little battalions” have never looked more crucial as generators of social capital and community cohesion than after a crisis that has undermined both. The emphasis of the government’s stimulus program has been on making individuals whole. What about a stimulus for the doing of things for one another, which is what local sport is about?

While big sport in empty stadiums is something, it is first about facilitating content creation for the beneficiation of sports commerce; it will also serve, at least ­initially, to reinforce the distance we must still cross to achieve ­normalcy.

Little sport, meanwhile, brings people together more cheaply, effectively, healthily and wholesomely than any comparable Australian institution. Time to do better at supporting us than the piecemeal measures and pats on the head offered so far. We’re ready. We can hardly wait to get back into it.