Never alone: the corona culture of sport and fandom

If a wicket falls in an empty stadium and no-one hears it, has it really fallen? The virus vexed future of playing and watching sport.

TELFORD VICE | Cape Town

“WHEN you walk through a storm.” Even the most casual football person knows what’s coming. “Hold your head up high.” If, somehow, they don’t know, the internet will tell them. “And don’t be afraid of the dark.”

There aren’t quite enough recorded versions … “At the end of a storm …” to assign one to each of the 54 074 seats at Anfield. “ … There’s a golden sky …” But many have been made since 1945 … “And the sweet silver song of a lark …” when it featured in Carousel, a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical.

“Walk on through the wind …” These lines have been ringing out wherever Scousers, actual and aspirant, have gathered since Gerry and the Pacemakers went to No. 1 in the UK charts in 1963. “Walk on through the rain …” At this point even non-Liverpool supporters pause to pay their respects, because this isn’t any anthem.

“Though your dreams be tossed and blown …” It’s the sound of loyalty and belonging … “Walk on, walk on …” and of knowing you are among comrades … “With hope in your heart …” This, surely, is the sound of love.

“And you’ll never walk alone … You’ll never walk alone.”

But, late on the night of July 22, Liverpool’s players and staff were indeed alone. With each other. They had gathered on a specially constructed podium in the stands of their famous stadium’s even more famous Kop end, which was draped in banners and flags.

The dazzling football both teams had played that evening, unhinged in the best way from having to take things seriously, in Liverpool’s 5-3 win over Chelsea was irrelevant. Nothing had mattered in the English Premier League since June 25, when Chelsea beat Manchester City to ensure Liverpool would win the title for the first time in 30 years.

As Jordan Henderson, Liverpool’s captain, thrust the trophy into the night sky, his players boomed their triumph behind him and lights, fireworks, music and glittery confetti filled millions of screens around the world. But there was a hollowness at the heart of the scene that could only have been filled by occupants of those 54 074 empty, silent seats. The only witnesses, bar the functionaries, were Anfield’s ghosts of successes and failures past.

You’ll Never Walk Alone had, of course, swooned around the void before kick-off. Lacking human embrace, the music bounced back the unhearing hardness, cold in its rejection. But the first touch of the ball was accompanied, on television, by a warm cheer for the champions.

Fact’s petticoat slipped from under fiction’s ballgown at the start of the second half, when the canned noise kicked in a heartbeat too late to spare viewers the rippling echoes of the players’ shouting and clapping their encouragement to each other. For a moment, sad reality was all there was to hear.

It’s the job of Adam Peri, a Sky Sports sound supervisor, to spare us that terrifying sound. National Public Radio sought him out and found him twiddling knobs for West Ham’s match against Watford in a studio kilometres from London Stadium. “Making sure the West Ham chants are nice and loud,” Peri said. A West Ham player went down. “I’m just going to trickle in a bit of whistles; giving it a bit of a boo …” 

He sees his role as “trying to anticipate what a player might do next, and in a way I guess I’m reading their mind. When you really get into the zone you’re living and breathing the game, feeling confident enough to use any sound that is available to help tell the story.”

The sounds Peri edits into viewers’ consciousness have been recorded at earlier matches by Electronic Arts, or EA Sports (EA), the makers of the FIFA video game. EA sound designer Paul Boechler revealed some of the geekery at play: “There’s things like the ‘oooh’ reaction for a save, and the ‘ooooooh’ reaction to a miss.” 

In football matches broadcast from Spain, a mosaic overlay was applied to camera shots that included the stands to break up views of endless rows of unfilled seats. Another difference will confirm the suspicions of those from sunnier climes that England’s unrelenting winter greyness seeps into hearts and minds. “The Premier League is doing negative reactions, but La Liga is actually not,” Boechler said. “La Liga is going with a much more positive reaction focus overall.”

La Liga head of communications Joris Evers confirmed as much, and added: “But it’s not the same. We want to try and get real fans back in the stands as soon as possible.” 

And so says all of sport. If a wicket falls in an empty cricket ground and no-one hears it, has it really fallen? England and West Indies restarted cricket with three Tests played in Southampton and Manchester. Not a lot besides the low burble of a crowd, artificially added by Sky, could by heard.

Without spectators the sound of major sport is of one hand clapping. That may be no bad thing. Instead of Sky’s audio smoke and mirrors, we could hear managers chewing gum between barks at their players. In Germany, Bundesliga viewers had the option of tuning out the canned atmosphere so they could do exactly that.

But it’s complicated, as the television audience discovered during a baseball game between the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Houston Astros in Houston played on the same day Liverpool raised the trophy. When Dodgers pitcher Joe Kelly lingered at first base after a confrontational play, Astros manager Dusty Baker, out of sight but not out of range of the microphones, was heard yelling, “Just get on the mound, motherfucker.”

Baseball has had an interesting relationship with empty stadiums. Alternative plans have had to be made for the millions of peanuts grown and roasted to be sold at games in the US, what with each team’s regular season schedule hacked from 162 to only 60 games. In Taiwan, cheerleaders smiled and danced at desolate stands. Down the road in South Korea, teams were in trouble after dressing up sex dolls and putting them in the stands. Bookmakers in the US have adjusted their odds to account for the assumption that, without spectators, home advantage isn’t nearly as influential.

Something similar happened in the Bundesliga, where teams achieved demonstrably better results than previously when they played away. And diving disappeared. What’s the point of trying to fool the referee by rolling like a freshly felled log for metres on end if thousands of one-eyed home fans aren’t howling in sympathy?

Will the seeming silence of the scrum, beyond the hit and heave, be shattered by the sounds of one pack of forwards trying to monster the other? Some of those noises come from strange places and are better unheard. It seems SuperSport, the primary broadcasters of the game in South Africa, will spare us the gorier details once rugby resumes. A spokesperson said the network was “still tweaking the tech, but as a matter of principle, we will incorporate virtual sounds, crowds and fan interaction”.

Even so, as long as stadiums stay empty except for players, officials and camera operators, a human-shaped vacuum will gape at the heart of sport. Professor Heather Reid is the philosophy chair at Morningside College in Sioux City, Iowa. She sits on the boards of publications like the Journal of the Philosophy of Sport and Sport, Ethics and Philosophy. Less extraordinarily, she’s also a fan, as she explained to the BBC: “I was in the bird’s nest stadium in Beijing the night that Usain Bolt broke the world record in the 100 metres [at the 2008 Olympics], and there’s this feeling that goes over the crowd that makes everyone feel like hugging each other. We transcend our partisan rooting for particular countries and a particular athlete, and we all start cheering just for what a human being is able to do.”

Unfortunately for all who know and cherish that feeling, another professor, bioethicist Andy Miah, the science communication and future media chair at the University of Salford in Manchester, is here to burst that bubble. “The big transition that people are coming to terms with is the idea that we are able to live within virtual worlds,” he said. “It’s really remarkable what’s happened over the last few months.”

Miah listed the Mutua Madrid Virtual Open Pro tennis tournament, which featured Andy Murray and Rafael Nadal squaring off not across a net but in front of a computer, holding controllers instead of racquets, as an example. And the Australia Virtual F1 Grand Prix, which replaced the cancelled real-world version: suddenly gamers were competing with drivers.

“Reality is going through a major upheaval,” Miah said. “Sport has always been a kind of unreality. We’re beginning to see a complete change of the relationship between the spectator and the player. People want to be part of the production of the sport, not just be spectators of it.”

Already, Formula E drivers’ electric cars go faster when they use a “fanboost” — a surge of bonus power available to the five drivers who win the most supporters’ votes. “We can imagine a future where you have crowds making decisions in the field of play in a much more direct way,” Miah said.        

The fans, it seems, are no longer content to watch alone.

First published by New Frame.

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David Gower and the Goliath of change

“If you asked Ian Botham about sports psychology he’d probably hit you: ‘What do I need a psychologist for?’ Bang!” – David Gower

Telford Vice / Cape Town

DAVID Gower was bored. So bored. The empty room’s silence had invaded his head, where it clanged about senselessly. Blinds on the windows blotted out much of what little daylight had seeped through the gloom outside. Noxiousness rose unseen from the damp carpets and lodged where nose and throat met. So very bored.

Consequently, a knock at Gower’s shut door was not ignored. Instead, he boomed: “Yes! Come in!” He didn’t have to say please — you could hear the prayer in his voice. 

Hello Mr Gower. I’ve come from the pressbox. I’m sorry to bother you, but with all the rain and no cricket to write about my editors have asked me to get your opinion on …

He didn’t tell his visitor, with whom he had never exchanged a word previously, to go away. He didn’t fob him off with, “Talk to my agent”, or, “My contract wouldn’t allow it”. The question escapes recollection, but he was viscerally attentive during its asking. Then he answered it, effusively, extensively and eruditely. And kept answering. Would he ever stop answering?  

The episode unfolded somewhere between an hour after lunch on January 14, 2000, the first day of the fifth Test against England, and the scheduled close three days later. Not a ball was bowled in all that time — the equivalent of 10-and-a-half sessions — because rain lashed Centurion like it seldom does.

Highveld summer days blaze with a heady incandescence that gives way to the beautiful violence of some of the most epic thunderstorms on earth. They issue from looming edifices of vicious black clouds that, hours earlier, had been but pale strands of candyfloss floating above the distant horizon. The deluge descends with a force that could knock the moustache off Merv Hughes, but rarely lasts for more than an hour. It is quite some show, worth more than the price of any cricket ticket. Then the gods are becalmed, the clouds melt away, the curtain is raised on the sun once more, the sky repairs itself to a dazzling blue, and play resumes in an exquisite light that shimmers with wet magic. For three-and-a-half days in the 2000 January, that didn’t happen. The rain came and stayed. And stayed some more. And still more.

All the while, Gower and two colleagues couldn’t leave their television studio lest the pilots of the mothership in London decided to “quickly pop in at Centurion to see what the weather’s doing … David? You there?” Of course he was. The studio had been set up in the hospitality box on the extreme left, as you look at the ground, along the crescent of buildings that hugs the northern boundary. Gower was maybe 200 hundreds metres of gates, corridors and civilian-strewn walkways from where the rest of the media were housed — snugly above the sightscreen — and further still from the dressingrooms. Should he venture there to relieve the tedium he would be too far away to make it back in time should London demand an audience at short notice.

He was marooned like Robinson Crusoe. At least Man Friday’s knock at his door gave him something to think about for a few minutes. Little did we know that a plot more convoluted than anything even Test cricket could conjure was being hatched, perhaps as we spoke, to force a result in a match that would otherwise have been drawn. All it took to seal the fix was R53,000 (USD2,850 at modern exchange rates) in two brown paper bags and a leather jacket “for your wife” from a gambler, Marlon Aronstam, who stood to lose big if the match did not end conclusively, to Hansie Cronjé. That and the agreement of Nasser Hussain, who had no knowledge of the tainting transaction. Innings were forfeited and declared, and England “won” the “Leather Jacket Test” by two wickets.    

“It smelled to high heaven!” That’s Gower in Cape Town a few weeks ago, and he wasn’t talking about the dodgy dealings — the stink of that studio has swirled in his memory all this time. He was on the top of Table Mountain at a marketing effort to help the Lord’s Taverners promote table cricket, which is designed to render irrelevant a range of physical and mental challenges that stop players from enjoying the game in more traditional ways. Table Mountain, table cricket …

It was a crystalline summer’s day. The scene couldn’t have been more different from the inside of that drab box at Centurion 20 years previously. Coasts curved this way and that for kilometres all around, the throat-catching views interrupted only by the mountain’s ancient crags. Above the sun seemed closer and warmer, like a loving parent. Far below the ocean murmured a rhapsody in blue. It was a good day to be alive for those who were there, and has become a precious memory of what the world was like before it was plunged into lockdown by the coronavirus pandemic. In the past weeks most us have come to know how Gower felt when he was confined to his studio, left with nothing but emptiness. Our reality has been replaced by something smaller and poorer in almost every way. We are bored, so very bored. And we’re the lucky ones: we’re alive and we have the space to be alone.

We will get back some version of the world in which to live, work and play. And to return to prominence in our minds current irrelevancies like cricket. We cannot know what cricket will look like in even the near future. But we do know what it looked like when the world as we knew it stopped turning.

It might, then, be useful — or just mercifully distracting — to consider how the game has changed since Gower sauntered to the middle at Edgbaston on June 2, 1978. And pulled the first delivery he faced in Test cricket, from Pakistani left-arm medium pacer Liaqat Ali, for four. That happened seven years after the first ODI, three years after the first edition of the tournament we now call the World Cup, bang in the middle of the three years that Kerry Packer’s World Series held up a cracked mirror to the game, 27 years before the first T20I and 30 years before the IPL. How different was cricket in 1978?

“That year I went on my first tour of Australia, where we had Bernard Thomas as our physio,” Gower said. “But he did everything. He was our physio, doctor, counsellor. Any problems that weren’t cricketing, you went to Bernard. For instance, no-one believed in sports psychology in those days. If you asked Ian Botham about sports psychology he’d probably hit you: ‘What do I need a psychologist for?’ Bang!

“We had a year at Leicestershire, a long time ago, where we could afford a sports psychologist for about a week. It was interesting how many of the players responded well to both the things he told them about working together as a team and some of the individual frailties he was able to help people with. We all have good times and bad times, and you tend to hide it, partly because it’s good for you to not show weakness. But it’s very important, to me, that it’s been recognised more as time has gone on.

“I remember a tour photograph a while ago — 16 players and 16 backroom staff. And I said something on TV which was slightly sarcastic, which didn’t go down well with the ECB at the time. There has to be a limit somewhere, and there’s only so much information you can take in as a player. I’m a believer in the instinct of what you might call natural players to address their own performances; to address the team, to address team situations, to play without, as it were, doing it by the book.

“All the assistance one gets now as a player might seem, to some of us, like overload. But, if you grow up with it, you kind of expect it. The net result is that there are a lot of very good players out there doing some extraordinary things, especially in the various newer concepts of the game. Watching some of things that go on, in T20s especially, it is a different game.”

That cricket changed vastly in the 18 years from July 1975, when Gower made his first-class debut, aged 18, to when he played his last match at that level, in September 1993, is indisputable. That it would be transformed exponentially more in the years that followed is also true. What has remained the same as it was at least 20 years ago is Gower’s habit of answering a question to within a whisker of its answerability.

“I felt I was was lucky to start my career immediately post-Packer, which was when cricket as an industry realised that it actually was an industry and not an amateur sport with a couple of quid thrown in for good measure. For instance, the first year I played for England was the first time they had a sponsor, and Test match fees went up from £200 pounds a game to £1,000 a game.

“The cricket industry has developed extraordinarily. TV has grown up with it. Who’s leading what I don’t know, but TV has given it the exposure and has been responsible for bringing in most of the money. All the major sponsorships around the world are all predicated on TV. There’s a billion dollars a year floating around Indian cricket. It’s a far cry from where it was 40 years ago. The game is still way behind the more global sports: soccer, formula one, tennis, golf. But the top players are doing well and aren’t complaining too much, or they shouldn’t be. If you’re Roger Federer I’m afraid you will make a bit more money than if you’re Joe Root or Steven Smith. But they aren’t going to starve.”

You had to watch him bat, if only to see the smudge that would end an otherwise immaculate innings. He was a Rolls Royce. Until he became a dodgem car.

Cricket has been good to Gower, and Gower has been good for cricket. Besides talent, ability, a level of toffishness that did not make him unlikeable, and a languid, liquid left-handedness, he was imbued with fallibility. You had to watch him bat, if only to see the smudge that would end an otherwise immaculate innings. He was a Rolls Royce. Until he became a dodgem car. That happened too often for the liking of the cold-hearted purists, who might have suspected they were being taken for fools: Gower was born on April 1, 1957. These days, his flagrant inconsistency would be ironed out of him at schoolboy level, and ruthlessly. Or, worse, he wouldn’t have a significant career. There is no longer room in the world of moneyed cricket for romance. 

Of England’s top seven in the famous 1981 Headingley Ashes Test, only Mike Brearley — virtually a non-playing captain, but the best of all captains — had a lower conversion rate of 50s into centuries than Gower. Brearley never made a Test hundred. Gower made 18, albeit that he had 138 more innings. Gower’s gift for doing and then undoing was a curiosity and a frustration for those who sat and marvelled at him from afar, the dressingroom or 22 yards away. For the man himself it was something else, as he wrote in his 2013 autobiography, An Endangered Species: “I came to realise that this wasn’t a normal condition. To an extent, every batsman has to strive to achieve that ideal state where brain and body function in harmony with bat, but I discovered that not every player had to work quite as hard as I did to get into the right frame of mind.

“Why could I sometimes do it, and sometimes not? This wasn’t just a mystery to other people. It was often a mystery to me.”

“All I had, all I needed, was that schoolboyish, yes public schoolboyish, enthusiasm for playing the game and having some fun with it. When it worked it was great but I got the message very quickly and very clearly from Ray Illingworth, my first captain at Leicestershire, and all those who had vested interests in my development, that my attitude and approach would have to harden if this was to work as a career. Luckily, that message never entirely got through.”  

There it is at the end of that passage: the smudge that endears Gower to some but, to others, sullies him. Not for him Geoffrey Boycott’s tedious religiosity about batting nor Graham Gooch’s dour run-collecting. All three were in that Headingley side, as was the player with the closest conversion rate to Gower’s — just 0.11% better — but who never lacked the public’s confidence. That he and Gower, and another giant of self-belief, became the firmest of friends is worth a thesis: you would have to go a long way to find personalities as removed from Gower as Botham and Viv Richards. Strange how the relative ruffians in that equation have been made knights of their realms while the more genteel Gower remains a mister. But he is his own mister.

As it was with Richie Benaud, a generation may be surprised to hear that Gower was a fine player. They grew up with him, vicariously, as a commentator — a second career that was put on ice in September when Sky Sports announced that, after 25 years of his avuncular presence on their screens, they would not renew his contract. Botham, too, was gone. Commentary has developed from the days when only the necessary was said to the modern penchant for shouting far too much in capital letters followed by multiple unseen but not unheard exclamation marks that fly like, well, tracer bullets. What was the future of the craft?     

“I hope standards are maintained,” Gower said. “With the spread of the game around the world and the uptake in television and radio around the world, there are good, bad and indifferent [commentators]. I like to listen to people who have a skill with words, who understand the game, and who can transmit the passion of the game without just getting louder. That’s a copout. As an observer of the observers — for a moment or two; I hope there may be some work somewhere — as players set themselves high standards to be as good as they can be, and if you’re not you run the risk of losing your place, as broadcasters they should maintain the same attitude. Of course there are lazy times and good and bad days. Some days every sentence appears to be polished and well thought through. Other days you can’t even speak your native tongue, which is a bit of a problem. But it’s a privilege to have done it for so long. It’s a privilege for anyone to be in that position, but it comes with responsibilities.”

Should positions on commentary teams be reserved for former players? “No. The proportion in commentary boxes of former players versus non-players is virtually non-existent, but it’s important that former players learn to broadcast. However great their capacity as a player, there are things they should learn. There are some very good ones. Michael Atherton is outstanding because he has an ability to put things with the right words. He is a bright man, a very clear-thinking man, and he has the talent to be able to write brilliantly and speak very efficiently, which cross-fertilise. He’s admitted that when he starts to write it helps him think about what he’s going to say on television, and when he talks on television that feeds back into the writing. There’s an aphorism that Richie Benaud used to use as words of advice: always engage brain before speaking. It’s useful to have that sort of thing in your mind.”

Difficult, isn’t it, to imagine Kevin Pietersen or Shane Warne knowing what an aphorism is. Or indeed to place them in the continuum with a player who was axed from his school’s first rugby XV for “lack of effort”, who earned a S level in history — in an examination attempted only by the best A level students — who wrote in his autobiography that an “errant ancestor gambled away [family-owned land] in a moment of boredom”, and who announced the end of a 10-year relationship by placing, along with the woman concerned, Vicki Stewart, a notice in The Times.

He played against a famous pair of Lloyds — Clive and David — in his first-class debut and was captained by Mark Nicholas in his last hurrah. His first match as a commentator was studded with Brian Lara, Curtly Ambrose and Courtney Walsh. His most recent featured Ben Stokes, David Warner and Steve Smith.  

Now, as cricket stands on the edge of an implosion to follow the explosion that helped make Gower the cricketer he was and the commentator he became, seems a good opportunity to consider how much has changed and how much will yet change. Because of the scale and pace at which the world seems to be disappearing before our eyes, that is a terrifying thought. But we know that, whatever happens or doesn’t, this will remain true: David Ivon Gower; sometimes bored, never boring.

Cricbuzz.