Are you ready to spend a couple of hours as a member of a crowd?
Finally, we might just rounding the bend into the home straight. Though we’d be as well to take the Westminster government’s pathway toward unlocking lockdown with a large pinch of salt and an Ancelotti-style raised eyebrow, given this mob’s long record of appalling, brutal and shockingly fatal incompetence to date. These are blood stains that no government minister’s denial, spin and outright lying will wash out. History will surely never bleach it from the fabric of the nation, no matter how much those who are responsible lie and connive.
However, within two or three months, we might just have the opportunity to go to watch a game of football again. It will feel like getting out of jail. Not that I’ve been in jail, apart from the few hours I spent in Hexham police station cells after being arrested for stealing a car. But I’m reliably informed release is both thrilling and scary. Exciting to be able to do what you want again, but intimidating to have to make choices about everything.
The degree of risk we feel about going to a game or doing anything else will vary depending on how vulnerable we personally feel. I’m pretty tired of people telling me how few people in certain age groups have died and everyone is therefore over-reacting, as though there is only health or death and nothing in between those poles.
Believe me, it’s not the dying that worries, it’s sickness. It’s the long slow and prolonged decline of health. I might survive getting Covid-19 but I don’t want to be some degree of really bloody ill, thank you very much. That’s not unreasonable and I’m sure many feel likewise, of all ages. The freedom of being able to go to see Greenock Morton play would definitely be outweighed by the need to have to stay in bed for two months feeling like death warmed up.
Similarly, even after getting a jab, how do I know I’ll not be one of the 10-30% for whom it is not effective? 10% of the population is still over six and half million people. Is that a dice I’m prepared to roll yet? I’m not sure it is.
I’m actually very intimidated by the thought of being in any sort of crowd again, not just at the football. Even seeing people being close to each other in pre-Covid TV shows now makes my skin crawl. It started out looking weird to see people standing a couple of metres apart but now it looks weird to see people crowding together.
I’m not sure we yet understand what this last year has done to us as individuals, as a community or as a country. We’re still keeping our heads down and just trying to get through, so now is perhaps not yet the time for reflection and self-analysis. That’ll come when there are choices to be made about the degree we indulge in our newly granted freedoms.
While some may feel able, with some degree of abandon, to resume life as it once was, many of us will be much more wary, reluctant and understandably hesitant to do so. Even when it is legal to let many tens of thousands of people into a stadium, how many will take up that invitation on a long term basis? Some may feel they can risk it once or twice, but 20 or 25 times in a season may be harder to justify. But then, some are more desperate to get out and about than others, for a variety of understandable reasons.
But the idea that when the freedom lever is pulled, suddenly we’ll be back to March 22nd 2020 is, I’m certain, a delusion. It will not be. How could it be? 120,000 people and rising have died of the same disease. Those ghosts will haunt us for a long time to come.
As infection rates go up and down and virus mutations occur, the problem may go from being physical to being psychological.
Would I want to go into the crowded Iona pub for a couple of whiskies before a Hibs game, as I once always did? No. Will I feel comfortable with breathing in the aerosols from the bloke behind me who only shouts “Time! Time!” whenever a pass is made to one of his players? No. Will I want to huddle in a small plastic seat next to a stranger? No. Would I want to queue to get through a turnstile with a load of blokes who have had eight pints? No. Would I be happy buying a programme that has got the seller’s fingerprints on the cover already? The very thought makes me feel edgy.
So yes, let’s thank God that there is light at the end of this long dark tunnel, but let’s prepare ourselves for some rain as well as sunshine when we do emerge.
John Nicholson
Johnny’s new book Can We Have Our Football Back YET? What Covid-19 has told us about the Premier League, is an update to his 2019/20 bestseller. “A searing account of a year like no other in football.”
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