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Martin Devlin: Playing football without fans isn't worth it

Author
Newstalk ZB,
Publish Date
Wed, 1 Apr 2020, 12:52PM

Martin Devlin: Playing football without fans isn't worth it

Author
Newstalk ZB,
Publish Date
Wed, 1 Apr 2020, 12:52PM

We need to talk. And keep talking!

As this upside down world of ours stutters and stumbles along each day, those connected with and consumed by the beauty of sport scratch our heads desperately trying to reinvent our favourite games, to get some form of combat and contest back in front of our eyeballs quicker than you can say kickoff.

The latest, if not greatest, of these ideas emanating from England is a radical proposal to finish this year's Premier League season by playing all the remaining games in an 8 week mini-tournament behind closed doors. On the surface it sounds more hopeful than helpful, an idea that although entirely possible is also awkwardly impractical.

The suggestion being to play the remainder of the season in isolated camps, free of fans, sort of like a mini in-house world cup tournament. There's 92 games left in this season, most teams having nine left, four teams with ten to play.

The plan would involve sequestering all players, coaches, trainers and club officials in quarantine for a fortnight to start with then providing everyone is CV19 free after that then relocating each club to hotels, housed on different floors etc, and completing the campaign at a series of pre-selected (and decontaminated) grounds perhaps by playing a series of televised matches back-to-back each day.

The TV component being of utmost importance because a large slice of the reasoning behind the proposal is the government in England being desperate to get something meaningful on asap to both soothe and appease the increasingly restless & bored proletariat.

The impracticality of it all complicated further by the need for sequestering and quarantine or all television operators, commentators, match officials, groundstaff, caterers, cleaners etc etc the list, as you'd imagine, almost endless.

Then comes the question of how real would any of this look, sound and  be anyway? Housing hundreds of highly-strung temperamental athletes in effective physical containment for 8 weeks and filming them as some sort of reality television, just to complete the season, has disaster written all over it - in every way imaginable. And is this what they, we, want to watch our sport anyway? Sport at any cost however contrived and unreal just so someone somewhere gets to play?

To paraphrase the legend that is Le Bron James: "Without fans the quality of any games are diminished. All players draw strength from and get affected by the fans in ways both good and bad.

Games without fans are not proper games. And I agree wholeheartedly with him. The whole thing would just seem so surreal and unreal. And, right now with where the world is, the idea that this  could somehow continue without upset, accident or incident unabated for eight whole weeks is fanciful.

Is something better than nothing? Is anything better than no thing at all? I applaud the inventiveness. I acknowledge also these are desperate measures for desperate times. But the reality of what is being proposed is simply not workable. Sure football, any football, would be great to see - but watching it under circumstances like these would seriously not be.

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