Sport fans want action, never mind empty stands

After a near total shutdown from mid-March because of COVID-19, the world of sports is beginning to show some signs of life. The German football league Bundesliga resumed last Saturday. Australia’s National Rugby League, suspended among much controversy, is also starting.

There is also talk of US Basketball (NBA) and Baseball (MLB) leagues beginning operations soon. Where cricket is concerned, a T10 tournament, the Vincy League is underway in the Caribbean. More importantly, England are scheduled to host West Indies and Pakistan in July, which would be a major hurdle crossed.

There are ifs and buts attached to all these fixtures, depending on how the COVID-19 pandemic plays out over the next month or two. There are apprehensions and trepidations galore. But even a sputtering start is a step ahead: better to have some action than none at all.

The most newsworthy cricket tournament this year, of course, are the Indian Premier League and the T20 World Championship, both of which were in limbo because of the assault by the coronavirus.

The IPL is ‘indefinitely suspended’ and the T20 WC faces logistical hardships. Though Australia is not as badly affected as other countries by the virus, strict compliance health measures, essentially quarantining of players from different teams, could be a major obstacle.

As I write on this Thursday afternoon, the ICC was still to have its meeting to determine the feasibility of hosting the T20 WC. If this tournament cannot be held, the window for IPL 2020 gets larger. It can be argued, however, that if there are logistical issues for the T20 WC won’t the IPL suffer similarly?

For instance, the biggest setback for the T20 WC is absence of spectatorship, which comes largely through gate money. This could also be a handicap for the IPL because it seems likely that the tournament, if it is played, will be only for audiences on TV and the digital platforms.

But where the IPL scores is on broadcast rights. The BCCI earns such phenomenal amounts from this – compared to which the ICC’s rights for the T20 WC – that purely on financial logic, the matter is a no-brainer.

Meanwhile, there is the issue of sport being played – in the short term, certainly – in front of vacant stands, without spectators in the stadium till the COVID-19 threat is substantially, if not entirely removed.

This is only possible if a vaccine is found that helps in prevention/treatment/both. That could take 12-24 months at least, going by reports from experts, which is a long period of time for the world of sport to remain comatose. This makes the coverage of sport only for TV and digital audiences the only recourse available.

Sports bereft of ‘live’ spectators is unnatural, obviously. Some experience of this exists from cricket matches played in March (Australia v New Zealand ODI, for instance, before the series was suspended) as well as in the Bundesliga tournament when it resumed last week.

How audiences and fans will take to this experience on a sustained basis remains to be seen. There is also the question of how motivated players will be to perform in front of empty stands. Like all performing artists, sportspersons derive inspiration and succour from a live audience Will they be able to retain the same intensity in the absence of fans?

There is the third dimension to this argument also, and perhaps even more vital going ahead. Technology is redefining – at breakneck speed – how we consume information/entertainment, which includes sport, and therefore it would be imprudent to say that sports without in-stadia fans would flop.

Those at the back and front end of technological developments are convinced that a ‘real life’ spectator experience can be simulated. In fact, they argue that this can expand the reach of sport because fans are not dependent on having to travel long distances to reach a venue.

In any case, say those in favour of technology, audiences at a venue are a miniscule of the total number of people reached for a sports event. This has given those in the business of sport, most importantly broadcasters, a sense of bullishness about winning over fans through state-of-the-art technology.

This is then supplemented by the belief that in a post-COVID-19 world, human beings will in any case have to make several fundamental changes in how they live life. I am convinced that leading sports networks and programmers are already pumping in millions of dollars to do research and develop technology which fans will appreciate.

A survey I did recently on my Twitter handle was instructive. I asked followers on my timeline how they’d react to sport being played without spectators in the stadium on a sustained basis.

The options were: 1) Yes, just want sport back (2) Sorry, not my scene (3) Doesn’t matter either way (4) I’ll wait, see and decide. Interestingly, 58 percent of 648 people who had voted at the time of writing this piece went with option 1.

This is revealing. It shows that sports fans, deprived of their ‘fix', are yearning for sports action whichever way it comes. This is the lifeline that sport across the world needs.

The writer is a senior journalist who has been writing on the sport for over 40 years.