Kieran Shannon: Covid again hitting sport in fields, halls, and pools

John Treacy’s forecast that there’d be no indoor sport before the rollout of a vaccine could well be proven right. Picture: INPHO/Laszlo Geczo

The year may have only started but for many of us our season — another one — may already be over. Or at least as we’d envisaged it.

While mainstream and social media has continued with its usual diet of top-end sport and anticipating what a 2021 Olympics might look like or speculating if the Lions tour is viable, there’s been barely a murmur about the grassroots, whatever about from them.

But that’s where most sport occurs: In a field, hall or pool near you, very possibly featuring you or your kids. And with Covid numbers as they currently are, most sport and sports are going to have adapt and adjust their plans, in some cases even more imaginatively than they did in 2020.

Already January is a write-off for every sport, outside those of who have been categorised as ‘elite’. Most likely, everything up to mid-February is as well. Around then some kind of controlled outdoor pod training could start back up but this side of St Patrick’s Day that’ll be about all that will be permitted.

That poses a dilemma for virtually every sport, outside of club GAA which should still be able to have some programme of games during the summer, just as it did this past one.

Traditionally most other team sports have been content to cede the best months of the year to the GAA, largely because they didn’t either perceive or want any clash and were happy to play their own games from autumn into the late spring. But now with them staring at a possible 18-month gap between the last time kids and players were treated to games in their sport, they might want and even need to flex their elbows to carve out some of the summer for themselves.

Take rugby. While the top-end of the sport will along with Premier League soccer command most of the headlines and our attention for the next two months, at grassroots level the game will remain dormant. As innovative as clubs — and schools — have been in keeping kids active and in the sport, those same kids have had no formal games since last March. Even the redesigned AIL, with its conference-like Energia Community Series, was only able to get two rounds of games in. 

As fluid as the situation is, the IRFU and its various branches, now that they have their feet back under the table after the Christmas break, need to storm some brains, consult with their grassroots and decide: Do they just hope to squeeze some games in before the end of May for everyone, or do they also play some form of rugger into the summer, perhaps expanding the seven-a-side game just to help keep the oval ball in hand and keep the jersey on their back? To leave it until next September seems too risky, too long.

Soccer is another sport with some big decisions to make. While summer football has taken off in various parts of the country, some of the country’s hotbeds, most obviously the Dublin District Schoolboys League, has resisted. But now they may have to alter their ways again out of sheer pragmatism. Not a ball has been kicked in the league this season. Do they just hope they can be back out playing in late March, early April and play maybe into May and then kick off a new season as usual in September, or do they play right through the summer, either just for this year or for the next few as well? Again, what’s best for the kids and not any administrator’s egos, should govern that call.

The way things are now working out, John Treacy’s forecast that there’d be no indoor sport before the rollout of a vaccine could well be proven right. 

Basketball had rolled out another impressive return-to-play pathway before Christmas in which it had hoped for the resumption of collective indoor training in early February followed by a truncated competitive season from March to May, but the new covid numbers have effectively pushed that plan out by a further month to the point it’s scuppered, effectively scrapped.

This is where basketball will have to be even more inventive and adaptable than it already has been to date. As rightly aggrieved as it may have been that its national league wasn’t afforded elite status and never got off the ground this season, it now has to accept the cheese has moved again and control what it can control.

While it couldn’t convince Sport Ireland and the government that its national league teams were worthy of elite status, it will hope and push that at least that courtesy will be afforded to its international teams who intend to compete in European championships this summer.

And then for the grassroots and underage game, it needs at providing some form of summer ball, possibly 3v3, allowing players some form of competition but also something suitably novel and different from the game they’ll be playing then through next winter.

And like every sport it has to seriously look at its age groups to retain as many players as possible in the sport. Take a kid who was U13 last season. In a lot of area boards, they’d have played U14. They’ve now missed out on their ‘strong’ year. When or if they resume the sport next autumn, they’ll again be playing in their weak year, essentially an U14 player playing in an U16 league where zone defences are permitted. Many of them won’t be ready for it.

To avoid kids quitting a sport they’ve only began, a certain creativity will be required, like maybe running half of the season, September to January, in the age groups that were meant to be in place for 2020-2021. Or offer competition in every age group, as Cork GAA’s Rebel Óg have now looked to provide, even if it’s just 75 percent of the games that would normally be laid on.

Covid has changed again. It has changed everything. Administrators and their formats and calendars will have to change with it.