Last week, a Bob Willis Trophy cricket match between Northamptonshire and Gloucestershire was abandoned in England after a Northants player (not playing in the match) returned a positive test for COVID-19 . He had been in touch with two members of the squad.
This is the price sport has to pay. Player safety is of the highest priority, and no team or tournament can afford to get it wrong.
Crucial
This is unlikely to be the first cricket match to be called off this season for this reason. It is crucial that every time such a situation occurs, a match, no matter how important or how exciting or how necessary for us to feel ‘normal’, is abandoned.
The Willis Trophy matches are not played in a bio-secure environment, as the international series in England were, and the IPL will be, but if there is the slightest chance of the virus spreading, then tests, contact tracing and quarantine, painful as these are, have to be gone through. And the match itself will have to be stopped. Most organisers are aware of this. That is why tournaments have strict protocols, and no individual is seen as greater than either the game or COVID-19.
Empty stadium scenario
The other unusual price sport is paying – empty stadiums – is something sportsmen are getting used to.
To watch an IPL match even on television, without its raucous noise-makers and over-excited fans and commentators, will be a new experience for the viewer.
How will the quintessential IPL commentator, all shouts and screams, bulging eyes and mobile face, manage? It may be easier to play before empty stadiums than to create excitement through high-pitched commentary.
Especially if the commentators call the game from a studio. But, as with everything else, we will get used to all this.
I don’t know if the organisers are planning to telecast crowd noises and cheers, as has been attempted at matches before. But in T20, all noises are welcome, even necessary. Silence is the enemy of the well-struck six. That ear-splitting trumpet at the matches, so often so irritating, has become an integral part of the IPL.
Signature tune
It is the tournament’s signature tune. It might be unnerving to watch a telecast of an empty stadium making so much noise, but memory will fill in the details.
When the sport itself is a new format of an established game, surely we can have a new format of an established audience? It will be interesting to see how such creative challenges are met. For that has been the essence of T20 cricket – its ability to absorb and popularise what would be out of place in the longer format.
The tournament has put in place extensive rules for dealing with COVID-19. The “if this, then that…” list is a step-by-step guide, and covers most situations.
The success of the bio-secure bubble during the international series in England might be a cause for confidence, especially if those who break the bubble are dealt with unsentimentally. Too much is at stake.
A third price sport may be paying is something that cannot be calculated immediately. Just how all the isolation, the bubble, the distancing – all antithetical to the sporting ethos – will affect a player psychologically will be known only much later.
Sport is a social activity, both outside the self, as when a performance arouses other players and the audience, and within, when it enhances self-worth. A large part of it is communal celebration. Divorce sport from its social setting and something important goes missing.
Safety norms
Every aspect of our lives has changed owing to the pandemic – the numbers are rising faster in India than anywhere else – and cricketers can communicate the safety norms to their audience more effectively than politicians have been able to so far.
The IPL has a large audience, and this year, with very few alternatives to it either on television or outside the homes, it might be larger still.
Television should make use of this opportunity to emphasise the three most important weapons we have in the fight against COVID-19: mask-wearing, hand-washing and social distancing.
Sending a message
It would be a pity if the players functioned in their bubble, and the rest of us did in ours without the message that we are all in this together, that we owe it to ourselves to stay safe.
Safety norms cannot be emphasised often enough. A Mahendra Singh Dhoni or a Rohit Sharma repeating them can only create greater awareness. And greater compliance.
The IPL is not a testimony to what we once hoped it would be – a return to normalcy in our lives.
But it might be a peep into the kind of routine we will have to learn to live with for a while: life goes on, but only if we allow it to.
