Sport

Enda McGinley: All pull together to battle through Coronavirus crisis

Kerry's Killian Spillane in action with Dublin's Niall Scully and Jack McCaffrey in the 2019 All-Ireland Senior Football Final at Croke Park, Dublin on September 1 2019. Picture by Seamus Loughran.
Kerry's Killian Spillane in action with Dublin's Niall Scully and Jack McCaffrey in the 2019 All-Ireland Senior Football Final at Croke Park, Dublin on September 1 2019. Picture by Seamus Loughran. Kerry's Killian Spillane in action with Dublin's Niall Scully and Jack McCaffrey in the 2019 All-Ireland Senior Football Final at Croke Park, Dublin on September 1 2019. Picture by Seamus Loughran.

What a week.

It's often said a week is a long time in politics, while in sport, we know well how much things change on the back of one result.

Tyrone, Cavan and Armagh all showed in the now-likely-irrelevant National League, how performance can veer wildly from one week to the next.

Yet all of those things pale into insignificance when compared with the marauding impact of the real natural killer we have come to know this past several weeks.

The enforced wholesale changes due to the Coronavirus to just about everything we recognise as typical day-to-day life are like nothing any of us have ever experienced.

Last week, as I typed my article on my usual Wednesday evening slot, I was writing about the potential for widespread cancellation of games.

I was hesitant on sending it in as there was still the possibility that nothing major was going to happen, and I would’ve appeared an over-dramatic eejit getting carried away by nothing less than hype.

Yet by Friday, if anything, I looked like I was completely under-calling it given the wholesale lock-down of sport that occurred in the frankly unbelievable 24 hours from Thursday afternoon and into Friday.

The GAA's leadership took emphatic and unambiguous steps in calling off the entire show.

The completeness of the ban took some, including myself, initially by surprise.

Yet, by Friday evening the list of organising bodies from major sports throughout the world, all axing their blue-riband events, made it clear the GAA were spot on in their decision.

The leadership they showed in what had to be a massively-difficult decision has to be commended.

We are all quick to criticise the GAA's hierarchy on comparatively minor issues, so it is but right to applaud them when they show such leadership in a decision where the stakes are incredibly high.

Sport, as we often remind ourselves, is only a game.

The mantra rolled out when those gut-wrenching Championship defeats come about is that ‘life goes on’.

Well as it turns out, sometimes life doesn’t just ‘go on’, or certainly not normally anyway.

As the regular flow of life grinds to a halt, the real-world impacts are so widespread and significant for individuals, families, businesses and national and global economies that, what would have seemed impossible sporting casualties now seem an in-consequential side effect.

They are far, far down the list of priorities at what is a quite frankly a bewildering time.

Yet boy how we will miss it.

At every level of the game, be it club or county, player or supporter, manager or committee member, for those invested in our games, they are what brings structure and flow to our day-to-day lives.

For many of us, the games and everything around them are our avenues for social relaxation and craic.

Far away from the monotonous nature of our daily work with its pressures and professional responsibilities, it gives us environments much more suited to who we truly are.

To lose such a comfort and joy at any time would be rough, to lose it at a time where we could be doing with it the most feels particularly cruel.

In last week's article, I spoke of the need to change our usual rule-bending or avoiding ways.

That was before the sheer depth of the bans and shut-down became apparent.

Yet the need for compliance remains just as high.

In any dressing room or family, we are only ever as strong as the weakest link.

Every person is reliant on every other person to do their bit.

In football terms, one person switched off when trying to execute a press on a kickout or one person hiding or not putting in the work will quickly kill an entire team's chances of success.

I’ve been hugely impressed and proud of the strong messages I have seen from clubs in this regard.

As a manager of Swatragh senior footballers, I would love nothing more than to be training them right now.

To be doing the bare minimum at a time when we should have been building up towards the launch of the club leagues in a few weeks is difficult to accept.

The paranoia that other teams might be stealing a march by breaking the rules and continuing training is inevitable and will be shared by many, yet, the ongoing news headlines and general public level of concern, keeps any temptation firmly in check.

We all know it would be easy to break the rules yet, like no other time before it, it just doesn’t feel like an option. To put, particularly our older members, at any sort of increased risk, for some kind of petty advantage would be plainly ridiculous and something few will countenance.

There are many misgivings about modern society and its many ills.

Without doubt, there is substance to much of those, yet, here we are in a situation where entire societies, cultures and patterns of daily life are being shut down.

In doing so, we see the global economy being accepted collateral damage when up against the value of human lives.

That might sound like an obvious balance, but it is an equilibrium that has appeared blurred too often.

Even more notably, it is protecting the lives of the older members of society, whose value can be so often disregarded in our fast-paced modern life, that is a central motivation in the crusade against the virus.

In these scary times the poignancy of that amazing turn of events should remind us that society is far from being lost.

If sport has to take its share of the pain amongst all of that, so be it. It is a small price to pay.

From a GAA perspective, there are the murmurings of a potential silver lining to keep our eye on as we head into the coming lock-down.

If the dust does manage to settle by early summer, there is a possibility that we could have an old-school straight knock-out All-Ireland Championship to lift our spirits.

If we are lucky enough to be out of it by then, it would indeed be a perfect way to welcome back normality.

Until then, though, we are all in this together.