The Belarusian Premier League had its moment in the sun in 2020. As Covid-19 travelled the globe, incapacitating sport as it went, one tiny eastern European nation stood – one might argue stupidly – defiant: the Vysheyshaya Liga would play on. And so, a 16-team league with an average attendance of less than 1,000 became the most-watched top-flight football competition on the continent.
By late March, once Australia’s A-League had been suspended, it was the only one in the world still persisting, apart from those in Tajikistan and Nicaragua. Sports networks in a throng of countries signed broadcast deals to feed their respective citizens the very best of what Dinamo Minsk and Shakhtyor Soligorsk had to offer.
Belarus president Alexander Lukashenko casually ignored FIFPro’s condemnation of the move as “frankly not comprehendible” and instead declared sport “the best anti-virus remedy” available. While wildly irresponsible – Lukashenko also ventured that vodka and saunas, and, well, God, can deter the coronavirus – there may be something in those words in an abstract sense.
If this past year has highlighted anything about sport, it is its capacity to provide relief during distressing times. The last 12 months have also underscored its overall value. Not to the industry, which depends on the billions of dollars it brings, but to the human being, whose livelihood might be wrapped up in Aston Villa, or the Sydney Swifts, or Collingwood, or the LA Lakers.
It is why a few football-starved Adelaide chaps created an online fan group in honour of FC Slutsk. The Belarusian city has a population of just over 60,000; the Facebook group has almost 7,000 members. And why, in a sporting sense, at least, 2020 has not been entirely wasted.
This was a year when Nick Kyrgios became a voice of reason and Novak Djokovic a symbol of gormlessness, when Eddie Everywhere became Eddie Nowhere and when Australia won the right, in partnership with New Zealand, to host the 2023 Fifa Women’s World Cup.
Crucially, it was also a year when sport did not die. In March, Australia’s all-conquering cricketers delighted a near-capacity MCG in the Women’s Twenty20 World Cup final and the W-League was the last professional football league in the world to complete a full calendar unaffected by the coronavirus shutdown.
But even after the AFLW season was cancelled midway through the finals series, the Olympics postponed, men’s and women’s cricket World Cups pushed back and Wimbledon cancelled altogether, sport was not spoken about posthumously. Tokyo 2020 has turned into Tokyo 2021, cricket’s governing bodies are jostling for precious spots on an increasingly crowded calendar and the Australian Open is due to start in six weeks (albeit without Roger Federer).
Some of the bells and whistles will be absent, but even without chanting and beer snakes, the narratives of an athlete or team endure.
How do we know? Because the AFL moved the grand final away from the MCG and it did not stop Dustin Martin putting on a show in Brisbane. Because the NRL still delivered its fair share of on-field quality, off-field drama and a State of Origin atmosphere that was the envy of the locked-down world. Because Super Netball produced a new champion and was rarely out of the headlines, and the A-League thrived in cooler conditions.
Because the Twitterati have not stopped serving up bloated opinions and their receivers have not ceased retaliating. Because even those not predisposed to preaching from a social media lectern are still showing signs of engagement through television audiences, fantasy football and virtual elite sporting events. And because people still care that Australia lost the second Test to India, and that the Wallabies cannot seem to get it together when it matters.
Wallabies players did, however, manage to produce one of the highlights of the year when they sang the Australian anthem in an Indigenous language for the first time at an international sporting event – a powerful gesture given the failure to acknowledge the identity and suffering of Indigenous people in other quarters.
It came against a backdrop of the Black Lives Matter movement as the conversation about racism in sport did not dim during the course of the year. Meanwhile, the VAR remains the subject of collective dread. And we collectively mourned the deaths of several sporting greats including Diego Maradona, Dean Jones and Kobe Bryant.
And we will continue to care into 2021, when disruptions will carry on but no one will stop paying attention. The Socceroos will recommence their 2022 Fifa World Cup qualifiers, Matildas will shoot for Olympic glory in Tokyo, the NRL and AFL will start their men’s and women’s competitions and the Australian Grand Prix has been confirmed.
Yes, it could take a decade to fully recover from a pandemic that has refashioned world sport in unrecognisable ways, and the financial fallout from this pandemic is scarcely fathomable. But while the resumption of normality may be a speck in the distance, that does not render meaningless all the happenings in between.
