Is the Government slowly preparing people to do without sport?

A full-to-capacity Páirc Uí Chaoimh might not be seen in the summer of 2020

The black humour came hard on the heels of the announcement yesterday evening.

“Gatherings of 5,000 people? We should be so lucky! Why, my club/ county team wouldn’t draw that in spectators over 12 months, would you stop, we were practising social distancing years ago, etc, etc.”

Would that it were so simple, as Ralph Fiennes said.

The statement looks straightforward at first glance. Local authorities all over Ireland have been advised by the Government that event promoters should be informed that events requiring licences in excess of 5,000 people will not be considered for the period up to the end of August.

This has been taken to include sports events, naturally enough, with the GAA’s inter-county Championship season obviously coming into the firing line, given it slots into that precise timeframe.

Or non-firing line, if you like your commentary on the literal side.

All credit to those trying to find a silver lining on this particular cloud.

There were quite a few comments to be found yesterday to the effect that this was a golden opportunity for GAA club activity, for instance, particularly as such games rarely draw crowds of 5,000 plus, particularly in the early stages — in fact, you could almost make the case that it would be beneficial in the medium term because by the time that end-of-August watershed passed people would be so desperate to see a game that club finals all over Ireland would benefit from a surge in attendance, right?

Right?

First principles: The situation is so fluid that by the end of business tomorrow we may see that shutdown extended. (Or shortened — yes, that’s possible. Just very unlikely.)

For the time being, let’s deal with the facts as they are.

The Government direction on crowds masks a wider challenge, no pun intended.

The issue of crowd size is moot, after all, if social distancing remains the most viable weapon against the virus, and there is no indication that that is likely to change any time soon.

As wiser people than this writer have said, the availability of a vaccine is the clearest sign of a resolution to this crisis; everything else is mitigation.

As a result, preventing people from gathering in crowds of 5,000 — or 3,000, or 1,000 — is an academic exercise if field games cannot be played safely, because social distancing is still in operation everywhere else.

There can be no suggestion that it’s somehow safe to play a sport which involves physical collisions, never mind touch-tight marking, when children can’t gather in a schoolroom.

Without straying out of our lane too much, we wonder if the Government is preparing people to do without sport completely, by incremental steps.

Planting the seed that crowds won’t be allowed to congregate in large numbers for sport is one such step; it may lead people to consider what social distancing means for those sports, and to make their peace with that. (A complete cessation of activity, if you hadn’t guessed.)

We shouldn’t be too surprised that this apocalyptic scenario is on our doorsteps, but don’t beat yourself up if it still comes as a shock.

Even as we nod along sagely when hearing terms like ‘the new normal’ or ‘we won’t be going back to the way things were’, we find it difficult to grasp what that means in reality.

There’s always a dissonance here between what’s rhetoric and what’s reality. Reconciling those two concepts has always been a challenge.

And sport, ironically, is often where that dissonance has to be accommodated.

Just as we accept that a player ‘hates to lose’ and is a ‘savage competitor’, we simultaneously reserve the right to be shocked when the savage competitor does something ... savage.

Unfortunately that doesn’t help us with this situation, which is the very definition of unforeseeable.

Without getting into special pleading on behalf of any sports organisation, though, it’s worth pointing out the cruelty of the cosmic joke being played on the GAA.

Practically every club in Ireland has mobilised its members to help and protect the vulnerable in their communities — social media fairly crackles with images of leaflets with helpful phone numbers, with food deliveries, with charity challenges, all of them featuring men and women in GAA half-zip tops and club hoodies.

The fact that its flagship competitions look doomed for this summer is the karmic equivalent of a late stroke right down across the knuckles.

Sorry about that one, but right now black humour is our only consolation.