THE FINISH LINE

Ok. How am I supposed to write about sport when there is nothing left? The Uzbekistan Professional football league season is in full swing. Pakhtakor thrashed Metallurg Bekabad 4-1 in a sensational drubbing that was both a great display of football and merciless victory. I’m so sorry that you had to read that. Look, Super Rugby, NBA, NHL, MLB and even cricket has been binned thanks to this virus going around. Usually when we write this segment we trawl through sports sections on websites like ESPN, Stuff, etc etc. But when we went to do it this week we hit a brick wall of headlines that read “_______ postponed/cancelled”. Look, I know you’re tired of hearing about COVID-19 but we really have no choice at this stage. 

Right off the bat, we can confirm with you that our homeboy Sonny Bill Williams is safe and sound over in the UK after his UK Super League team Toronto Wolfpack went into lockdown due to four players experiencing mild coronavirus symptoms. On the other hand, the disease has made its way into the NBA well and truly, at the time of writing this there have been four Brooklyn Nets players who have tested positive, one of which was Kevin Durant. Odds are this could probably be pointed to the recklessness of Utah Jazz player Rudy Gobert, who was the first player to get infected in the NBA. In case you didn’t know, he made fun of the virus in a press conference and rubbed his hands over the media microphones as well as touching other players and their belongings when they were in their locker room. 2 days after this, he tested positive. What a plonker. This has meant that there are a number of players in the NBA who have been infected by the virus, so hopefully it doesn’t spread further because that would be pretty shit, wouldn’t it?

Furthermore, the forty-year ‘curse’ is beaming down on the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. It’s a problem that has been appropriately named from the cancellation or boycott of the Olympics every forty years. First, it happened in Japan in 1940 due to the second world war, and then the mass boycotts in 1980 for the games to be held in Moscow. As far as we know, Japan isn’t making any plans to postpone the Olympics, and are continuing to prepare for them as they were before the virus hit, according to the government’s top spokesman Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga on Wednesday. Will this decision still stand in the coming months? Will countries even be allowed to send their own athletes due to quarantine and border controls? We’ll have to wait and see, and it could be a right fuckup if they decide they have to pull the pin at the last minute, forfeiting hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue and thousands upon thousands of jobs. 

On top of all this, most club sports in New Zealand have been cancelled, such as cricket and rugby. I suppose that’s a good thing, not just in the sense of preventing the spread of this god damn virus, but you may have some friends who always turned down loud quiets on a friday because they had a game on saturday morning and they have no excuse for that now. Seriously though, stay safe and look after yourself, listen to what authorities have to say. Or, you could go down to the Winchester for a pint and wait for this to all blow over.