Back at the start of March, nine months, 17 days, and half a lifetime ago, England beat Wales at Twickenham. It was 33-30 and the score makes the game sound more memorable than it feels now. Reading back through the match reports, Justin Tipuric finished off a fine, galloping try from the kick-off at the start of the second half, Manu Tuilagi was sent off for a dangerous tackle on George North, and but really, all I recall is that Boris Johnson and Carrie Symonds were there, two among the crowd of 80,000, and when they were picked out by the cameras and put up on the big screen, he put on an imbecile grin and gave everyone a great, cheery wave.
The photos of Johnson and Symonds, engaged and expecting, played well in the Tory papers the next day. The Daily Express described how the couple “braved” the virus to support England. Johnson’s social media team tweeted a few photos, too, with the jaunty caption: “Fantastic afternoon at Twickenham watching the rugby.”
Even then, it felt tone-deaf, about as well timed as one of his tackles and entirely at odds with the uneasy atmosphere at the ground, where, judging by the way people were swapping awkward elbow-bumps, I wasn’t the only one who felt a nagging anxiety about being out and about in such a large crowd.
That day, more than 200 cases of coronavirus were confirmed in the UK. The organisers had already started to rearrange games, England’s match against Italy in Rome had been postponed, and the health secretary, Matt Hancock, had already warned that the government might need to ban large gatherings at sporting events in the UK too.
“What is he waiting for?” wrote Keith Wilson, a former associate professor of community care, in a letter to the Guardian, “Has he ever travelled to and attended a rugby international at Twickenham? This Saturday 80,000-plus people from all over England and Wales will be squashed in like sardines.”
It wasn’t clear what the answer was. Perhaps they were waiting for everything to get much worse, which it quickly did. Five days after the match Johnson was back on our screens, he wasn’t mugging this time but was wearing his serious face. He said we were facing “the worst public health crisis for a generation”, which wasn’t quite the impression he’d given when he was waving at everyone from the royal box a few days earlier. Even then the government didn’t ban crowds from gathering at sporting events, but said, instead, that it was “considering it”.
Apparently it was of the opinion that such a ban would “have little effect on the spread”, which now seems to make as much sense as thinking water won’t get you wet. A few weeks later, the Cheltenham Festival’s organisers explained that Johnson’s day out at Twickenham was one of the reasons why they decided to press ahead with their own super-spreader event the same week he gave that press conference, a decision Sir David King, the government’s chief scientific adviser between 2000 to 2007, later described as “the best possible way to accelerate the spread of the virus”.
Ten days after the Festival ended, 16 days on from the match at Twickenham, the prime minister announced the first UK lockdown.
So yes, the image of Johnson waving to the crowd isn’t one I’d choose to keep from 2020 but is one I’m stuck with anyway, just because it seems to sum up something about what has happened since, and how we got where we are now. We could talk, too, about the way the government flip-flopped on whether or not to allow limited crowds back into venues when clubs were struggling for revenue, and its muddleheaded policies about who is and who isn’t allowed to play which recreational sport when, and questionable calls about which sports should get bailed out and how. It will take years to repair the damage done these last few months.
There have, despite all that, been some glorious bits of sport, a lot of them impromptu, and away from the big stadiums, from that brief, and utterly nuts, craze of people running marathons in their back gardens and up and down their balconies, to the endearing enthusiasm for obscure online events, like the charity T20 match in Guernsey that pulled in almost 100,000 viewers on YouTube because it was the first game played anywhere this season. Better yet, all those sweet and satisfying moments in which Johnson’s government took a kicking from some of the sportspeople whose success he’s been so reliably keen to exploit for his own ends.
How sweet and satisfying that that image of Johnson will be joined in the gallery of the sporting moments from this year by so many others in which athletes were out campaigning for progressive causes.
Nothing that has happened in sport these last few months made as much of an impression on life in this country as Marcus Rashford’s campaign for free school meals; nothing that has happened on the pitches and tracks as impactful as the work Raheem Sterling, Maro Itoje and Michael Holding have done to force a conversation about the effects of institutional racism inside and outside sport; nothing as inspiring as the measures taken by Lewis Hamilton, Ebony Rainford-Brent and Anthony Joshua to bring about real change.
There was more. All the people who lobbied the government to support grassroots sport, all the people who called on it to give clubs permission to take advantage of all the safety measures they’d designed and invested in, and allow fans back into their grounds. And even now, at the end of it all, you still hear people make that dim and dreary argument that sport and politics shouldn’t mix. There’s no truth to it, just so long, that is, as it’s the athletes who are doing the mixing.
