Martin Smith: Football fans will have to wait until Covid-19 is completely defeated

No fans, no real football.

Behind closed doors will have to do for now.

Is it just me or has anyone else NOT missed the bitter Twitter exchanges? The tit-for-tat squabbles over VAR? The ‘he said, she said’ exchanges on referees, choice of subs, ‘biased’ commentators’.

Since football proper kicked off in Sheffield in 1857 it has come to represent a billion things to a global audience and the sideshow that comes with the sport reflects the significance of football worldwide.

We desperately want the game back, with fans, atmosphere and all the scarf-wearing, beer-drinking, social media-whinging cultural hoo-ha that goes with it.

But we’ve no chance yet even with restrictions slightly loosened.

Are we sulking? Yes we are.

Whenever arguments like these are aired we come to the historic imperative that says: Look at two world wars and what people went through and then tell us you can’t drink beer in your garden or on your balcony or miss the pub or football without having to whine at how unfair life is?

To be fair to Boris - which is very difficult as he represents the party that oversaw a decade of austerity and helped create the funding and preparedness deficit that we now see helping to put Britain’s Covid death tally near the top of the world league of shame - he’s on a hiding to nothing.

He’s trying to ease lockdown without actually easing lockdown.

It is a policy that is doomed to fail.

Trusting people to do the right thing is a grown-up and responsible approach.

But some people just aren’t grown up or responsible.

Most will abide by the safety advice but some won’t and the infection rate will rise again because of them.

Friday’s 75-year VE Day celebrations remind us that wartime deaths statistics are at their most impossibly sad when you come to those killed an hour after the ceasefire because someone didn’t get the message that it was over.

So it will be with the virus.

Eventually we will get on top of it. Death and infection rates will drop, we will start to feel safe again.

But even when we’re down to ’only’ 10 deaths a day that means ten devastated families when all around them are saying the war is won.

No vaccine, no fans.

Even one death is too big a price to pay.