Five years on: how Covid changed sport for better and for worse

With the pandemic in the rearview mirror it was clearly a boost for Fifa and Saudi Arabia but harmed grassroots sport and player welfareSound the trumpets, beat the drum, let loose the buttock-rockets of hope. One of the strangest and most unsatisfying things about the Covid‑19 pandemic, among a great many deeply strange and unsatisfying things, is that it never actually had a shared end date or ceremonial send-off.Jarringly so, because this was a period in the national life built around a rigid roster of public events. The numerical rules. The weekly banging of pots in honour of people you secretly consider to be serfs. Such unlikely figures as health secretary Matt Hancock appearing in public every day in order to say inauthentic-sounding things about public health, all the while resembling the doomed subcommander of an imperial space galleon who keeps announcing that he’s got the situation under control, sir, just as the bridge behind him is cleaved in two and he’s sucked out into a skull-popping deep space inferno. Continue reading...

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