Docklands: an odd harbinger of sport‘s future

Although I have long been suspicious that – as those close to me like to presume – sport will return to something like what it was before the COVID-19 pandemic, this article by Dr. Ezekiel Emmanuel shows beyond doubt that this is unlikely.

For a start, no vaccine has been found against any past coronavirus. A drug is a more promising solution, but Dr. Emmanuel says that it is extremely unlikely that lockdown laws will end altogether for eighteen months, or before October 2021. In the context of the shut-down sporting industry, this has several implications:

1. Given the extreme risk of transmission of such a contagious virus, it is unlikely spectators will attend again anywhere before the 2021/2022 southern summer sporting season
• Even a return of spectators in 2021/2022 is by no means certain or even likely
• The longest possible time before spectators might return is not even noted or discussed, as if it is plausible that many years might pass before spectators return
2. Sports that do return will have to play with no spectators until at least the 2021/2022 southern summer season and possibly for many seasons beyond
3. Sports that do play will be totally reliant on television (and perhaps radio) audiences for several complete seasons and a revised revenue model will be required
4. It is quite probable that sports that do return will play in neutral venues in remote areas freed from COVID-19

So far, sporting commentators have ignored the long-term implications of the points noted above. However, it is clear to me from my knowledge of the history of cricket and [Australian rules] football that the unavailability of the traditional live audience will have profound, permanent, long-term effects on how sports are played:

1. Because television’s main revenue source – corporate advertising – is likely to return several seasons before spectators do, television contracts will grow rapidly once sport returns without spectators
2. Sports leagues and rule-makers will have at least one season and most likely three or four to adjust rules to make their sports more suitable for television
3. These changes will no doubt:
1. Make sporting contests much shorter and more stop-start-stop-start-stop to fit in more games and advertisements on television
2. Make playing top-level sport more exclusive by requiring more specific and specialised body types to play particular sports
3. Make playing sports much riskier because shorter playing periods and stop-start play will allow players to put much more energy into short bursts, creating much more intense contact (no necessarily player-to-player)
4. The changes noted in (3) will make it much less worthwhile to attend sports with the much smaller quantity of play
5. The requirement of strict quarantine for players to protect against contagious COVID-19 and future viruses will no doubt mean that sport will be much more confined to the major leagues than before the COVID-19 pandemic.
• The only exception will be junior leagues for players too young to play in the major leagues
• Rather than have minor leagues, players of lesser ability will serve in the major leagues as reserve players, creating systems akin to the “huge interchange bench” feared by Eddie McGuire in my old Football Year 1991
6. Lack of minor leagues will produce much more pruning of junior players
• However talent pools will be much smaller due to more rigid size requirements (à la telegenic basketball and volleyball) as discussed in point (3(3)).
7. Players will be required to develop at much younger ages due to absence of opportunities in lower leagues for slow-developing talent.
• Typically they will go from high school to high-level professional leagues – previously a great rarity seen only for such precocious talents as the late Kobe Bryant

There is, in fact, a very strong possibility that sports when they do return will be under a totally new model, but one reminiscent of the changes brought about on [Australian rules] football by the replacement of Waverley by Docklands twenty years ago. The creation of closed-roof stadiums has mimicked this to some extent in other sports, but it may not have had the same effect it has on football.

What is unique to the AFL but which COVID-19 may make the global norm is centralised grounds, where all matches are played at a few nearby venues. Although the AFL has centralised grounds only for its Melbourne matches, it is possible that MLB and the NHL may adopt this policy for entire post-COVID-19 leagues. It is indeed possible that outdated facilities – as the VFL’s old suburban grounds were due to of of government neglect, health regulations or fixed ticket prices – will not be replaced.

It is also possible that – as has happened in the AFL to a considerable extent since the phase-out of the suburban grounds – teams will no longer be identified geographically or locally but will be truly global businesses identified by name (what we could call “brand”). There is some advantage to this in that teams may not be able to be located in unviable markets and will have to work out themselves where to look for supporters; however, I have not spent any time looking at the full implications.

Whilst under present conditions this new model may be necessary, experience watching football and other sports makes me more than critical. It is a model of restricted opportunities, necessarily fast player development, and potentially very high injury risk. All of this I have recognised ever since studying not merely football and the transition to Docklands, but even cricket and the transition away from first-class cricket – which has been played for the last time before I write this – to one-day and 20/20 forms.

Australia’s grave failure

With the whole of life in Australia likely to be altered for up to eighteen months by the COVID-19 – originally known as “novel coronavirus” – pandemic and being extremely angry at the risks of travelling on public transport as I like to do, it stands remarkable that some of the resource-poorest nations in the world have been the few able to properly respond, as Time demonstrated four days ago.

As resource-impoverished Taiwan demonstrated, Australia could have dealt with this pandemic by:

1. pre-emptively ensuring complete isolation from known sources by immediately grounding passenger planes and ships, preferably without costly mitigation to airlines
2. ensuring as many people as possible are tested and isolated if positive
3. immediately sanitising and sterilising all large indoor meeting places and public transit vehicles
4. aiming to raise as much money as possible for these purposes
• A temporary $1 or even $2 per litre levy on all motor fuels would I feel be highly suitable for this purpose
• even an $2 levy at the maximum price in the weekly cycle would leave petrol at $3.60 per litre
• given Australia’s lamentable greenhouse emissions record such a price in no way stands unjust

The problem was the power of vested interest lobby groups, a worse problem in Australia than just about anywhere in the world. Air transport, for instance, would have vehemently opposed an immediate shutdown of operations without mitigation. Given the power these corporations hold globally – as seen in debates over greenhouse gas emissions, where corporations who should be paying the full costs of climate change globally can increase their emissions – they possess great responsibility in times of crisis.

1946 Wisden similar to one of mine held at a bookbinder

These have not been fulfilled at all: the Liberal Party government is clearly more concerned to protect the mining magnates’ wealth than to prevent the spread of COVID-19 at minimal cost to ordinary Australians.

In recent discussions with my mother, she has noticed how Australia has not even been spraying its public transport to reduce the risk of transmission in the most ecologically necessary of all social services. In contrast, East Asian nations are spraying even external areas of their cities, as I watched on a video yesterday. Australia with its immense natural resources ought certainly to have enough money to do this so that public transport and other businesses can have their risk minimised.

As things stand, there exists a risk of a complete shutdown of public transport in Melbourne, and even of important services that hold some of my own property including a 1946 Wisden – although I have accepted my mother driving me there if the shop be still open. There is also the risk that there could be permanent changes to Australia’s economy and the shutdown of many small businesses. All of this would have been averted if Australia had responded promptly. So would (Australian rules) football and rugby games behind closed doors – a not improbably permanent move even beyond when and if the pandemic does subside.

The WHO’s blind spot

In recent days with the threat of a complete lockdown in Australia, and already being extremely angry at the potential loss of public transport which I so love, as well as not being able to go to public libraries, there is one thing I have realised.

That is that the World Health Organization – who declared COVID-19 a pandemic eight days ago – has a major blind spot about the quarantine of international travellers.

Have a look at the final question on this extremely familiar (to me) Australian incoming passenger card:

Australian incoming passenger card. Note that there is no question about visiting South or East Asia, although that region’s ecology is more suitable to microbe growth than Africa or eastern South America

The question reads:

“Were you in Africa, South/Central America or the Caribbean in the last 6 days?”

The reason for this requirement is to exclude dangerous infectious diseases – mainly yellow fever – from Australia. Tropical Asia has never had yellow fever, which originated in prehistoric times from African monkeys and spread with slavery to tropical Latin America. Yellow fever was the first virus to be isolated – even before the invention of the electron microscope – and for this reason tropical Asia, even at much lower levels of development than today, successfully quarantined it.

Nonetheless, as Anthony Mills and Antoni Milewski showed in their ‘Does Life Consistently Maximise Energy Intensity’ – which celebrates its tenth anniversary this month – the most favourable environment for microbes is one with an abundance of catabolic nutrients. Catabolic nutrients are almost always chalcophile elements, which form covalent bonds with less electronegative nonmetals like carbon, phosphorus and sulfur. Because they are highly volatile and form dense sulfide minerals, chalcophile elements are, on Earth, bidirectionally depleted from the crust. They are depleted both by:

1. core formation which is estimated to take up 99 percent of the dense chalcophile minerals
2. evaporation into and from the atmosphere which loses the volatile chalcophiles to space

Within the crust chalcophile elements are intensely concentrated at plate boundaries where they can be uplifted from greater depths. Consequently, they are highly enriched in areas of high mountains, excluding mountains built from acidic igneous rocks, and further depleted on old tropical cratons.

If we follow Mills and Milewski’s criteria and add the requirement of hot or warm temperatures for microbial growth, tropical Asia, alongside Mesoamerica and Andean South America, becomes more favourable for microbial growth than less eutrophic Africa or non-Hispanophone South America. The humid subtropics of Asia and especially the hypereutrophic Pampas of South America also stand out as highly favourable for microbes.

Thus, even if yellow fever and other endemic infectious diseases are absent from tropical Asia, what COVID-19, and even SARS, does demonstrate is the need for quarantine of travellers exiting tropical and East Asia equal to that for those exiting Africa and Latin America. If travellers had been so quarantined when COVID-19 broke out, it would not have spread into communities outside China.

Not a second “amazing blunder by a plumber”

Around six years ago I discovered a remarkable case in Norway in 2006 of beer instead of waster being connected to a water pipe! It seems utterly incredible to me that a plumber could make the mistake described here.

However, tonight my brother said that recently in Italy there was a second “amazing blunder by a plumber” whereby last Wednesday (4 March 2020), in Castelvetro di Modena about 200 kilometres from Milan, domestic taps started spewing local red Lambrusco wine instead of drinking water.

In reality, however, this was utterly different from the case in Kristiandsund, where beer hoses were hooked by a careless plumber to Miss Haldis Gundersen’s water pipes. Miss Gundersen, a fifty-year-old pub owner, said that the beer was not tempting to her patrons.

In Castelvetro di Modena, however, rather than have pipes wrongly connected, wine due for bottling was accidentally introduced into the local water supply by the ‘Cantina Settevetro’ winery. Unlike in Haldis Gundersen’s bar, plumbers were entirely uninvolved in what was described as a “miracle” of water turning into wine.

The dangers produced by political polarisation

In his new article ‘Rethinking Polarization’, American political scientist Jonathan Raunch argues that the increasing polarisation of the American electorate since Bill Clinton’s impeachment is purely and essentially a reflection of fear of the enemy rather than belief in the party one follows.

Raunch notes that the most recent polls form last year show that Democrats are now as averse to compromise as Republicans – who have long been criticised on that issue. However, what Raunch shows is that:

1. the political center has little interest in politics and its reluctance makes those who do show interest more extreme
2. polarisation has been affective in nature – Republicans have developed a hatred of Democrats and Democrats a hatred of Republicans
3. people hate the opposite party because of disappointment in their own political party

Raunch also argues that the collapse of mainline Protestant denominations has displaced apocalyptic and redemptive impulses into politics, and when one combines this with stagnant real wages for the less educated and the absolute decline of industrial jobs, poor white men become marginalised and extremely open to demagoguery.

When Raunch points out this, I am reminded of the situation in Protestant parts of Weimar Germany. There, urban workers, who had unlike their US counterparts completely discarded organised religion, turned en masse to the Communists, whilst the remainder of ancestrally Protestant Weimar Germany turned en masse to the Nazis. The radically individuoegalitarian nature of the Left’s “identity politics” where each person is special due to his or her lifestyle choice and has no connections with even adjacent residents, was also replicated in the culture of Weimar Germany. This lack of connections eliminates senses of shared citizenship.

Dietrich Rüschemeyer showed in his Capitalist Development and Democracy that the combination of these features with a powerful class of large resource owners was – in part – the cause of the collapse of Weimar into the totalitarian Nazi regime. There is to my mind little doubt that in the US the owners of large natural resources like coal and oil fields are at least privately hostile to democracy for nonwhite peoples, because mass mobilization of nonwhites would create demands for extremely high tax rates for these corporations. Unlike in Nazi Germany, the Republican Party has been able to make changes – felony disfranchisement, mass incarceration, voter ID – in a gradual manner. However, it does seem plausible that – even if only the “fringe of the fringe” like Lawrence Auster will dare to say so publicly or in print – the Republican Party’s business backers are emotionally dissatisfied with anything bar a lily-white electorate and no income taxes like existed before the Civil War. If this be true, polarisation is likely only to widen, even if its danger should the Republicans gain more and more power would be economic. Big businesses would be propped up by government to the exclusion of other services, which would create severe social (as “pull” factors lessen in the United States and it becomes less attractive to immigrate to) and environmental (via greenhouse gas emissions increases) effects that would flow on to the rest of the globe.