Alan Pattullo: We're all kicking our heels without football

‘It feels like we have woken up in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, it was surreal in the extreme’

Ibrox and Fir Park lay empty over the weekend but at least we got the opportunity to thrill to the skills of Nassim L’Ghoul playing for Dover.

Welcome to the match report that isn’t of the Old Firm clash that wasn’t. There were supposed to be hundreds of words on these pages chronicling the agony and the ecstasy of a meeting at Ibrox that could well have gone a long way to deciding the destiny of the Premiership title.

It’s now possible that this question, like currently unresolved issues in every league in the land, might never be settled.

When we do go again, it will likely be a brand new season. The hope is this will be as soon as July/August, but perhaps even that is wishful thinking.

No one knows what will happen. No one knows when the whistle will blow to signal a re-start.

Sport bookends our weeks

What is becoming clearer after just the first weekend of this strange, sports-less landscape, is the extent to which football, rugby and other sports bookend our weeks.

Not so long ago, the idea of self-isolating actually seemed quite attractive. Before the seriousness of this virus really took hold, it was possible to feel quite jealous of those tourists coming back from cruise ships and being deposited straight into isolation units. Just imagine, with all that downtime and with no daily chores to attend to, how much sport could be watched on television.

Finally, we could make good those expensive subscription sports channels we pay for and never have the luxury of watching.

Now many of us do have the downtime, just no sport to watch. It’s like the episode of The Twilight Zone titled Time Enough At Last, where the protagonist, a bookish chap who works as a bank teller and is ridiculed for his obsession with reading, is the sole survivor of an H-bomb attack having been downstairs in a vault at the time eating lunch.

His understandable dismay on his return to find a rubble strewn landscape is soothed considerably when he stumbles upon the contents of a library. He is exultant.

Finally, he has all the time in the world to read – and no one to admonish him. But to his – and the viewers’ horror – his spectacles fall off his nose when he bends down to pick up one of these books and are completely smashed. There will be no more reading.

Have we woken up in a post-apocalyptic wasteland?

Will there be no more watching football? Not for a while, certainly. It already feels like we have woken up in a post- apocalyptic wasteland. Saturday was surreal in the extreme.

Sky Sports tried valiantly to whip up excitement for the Notts County v Eastleigh clash in the National League and it was easy to get drawn in in the absence of anything else. The same applied to Dover Athletic v Chesterfield, where the magnificently named Nassim L’Ghoul struck a late equaliser for the home team. Get in! This is what it had come to.

In between times, we were taken by live feed to a very empty sports hall in Surrey for the countdown to a netball match. We even had a two-minute interlude watching Fifa president Gianni Infantino, left, washing his hands. The look on the faces of the redoubtable presenters when we returned to the studio said it all. Jeff Stelling, by the way, had been given the afternoon off. Get used to it Jeff.

In what world would Bayer 04 Leverkusen be playing (and losing to) Hull City?

Resorting to Twitter was not much better since some clubs – or at least those in charge of their official Twitter feeds – had decided to do that ghastly thing where clubs’ Twitter accounts talk to one another. Worse, they were challenging each other to games of noughts and crosses and connect four. It was not even realistic. In what world, post-apocalyptic or not, would Bayer 04 Leverkusen be playing (and losing to) Hull City, as was the cringe-inducing case on Saturday afternoon.

Off the Ball more on the ball

BBC Radio Scotland’s Off the Ball reacted well to the crisis of there being no actual football. For a show that’s not about football, or at least proposes to take a sideways look at the game, this was expected.

Admirably, they invited the Scottish government’s national clinical director on to the show to answer listeners’ questions about coronavirus. Petty and ill-informed? Not on this occasion.

Still, it was hard all the same not to think about all those cathedrals of football sitting empty throughout the land.

The turnstiles remaining resolutely unclicked, the pre- and post-match pints unpoured, debates unspoken and match reports unwritten.

It’s hard to break the habit of a lifetime. I know there’s the close season but that time of year often seems like a blessing following a long, hard campaign.

Right now, when football has been snatched from us so abruptly just when the season was getting particularly interesting, it feels like a most brutal act of robbery. Envy was the initial emotion when Sky Sports ran through a list of places where football was still taking place, such as Turkey, parts of Brazil and Australia.

I know the correct response was – idiots.

Perhaps football-less weekend afternoons will regain some sparkle

Perhaps it will get easier the longer the break lasts. Perhaps football-less Saturday and Sunday afternoons will regain some sparkle. Of course, it’s not just weekends. The coming days were meant to be full of drama as Champions League last-16 clashes

concluded, along with Europa League last-16 ties. They are now destined to be football’s version of a TV cliffhanger that’s never resolved.

Some certainty will presumably emerge from the Uefa meeting tomorrow morning, when the fate of Euro 2020 and these half-played European ties will become known. It’s the same day as Steve Clarke was meant to name his squad for next week’s eagerly awaited and sold-out play-off semi-final v Israel.

It was supposed to be the biggest match of recent times for Scotland. Now it’s just another ghost game amid hundreds of others that may or may not ever get played.