Martin Smith: Sport has learned its place but it can’t come back soon enough

A picture shows the statue of Liverpool football club's late legendary manager Bill Shankly at Liverpool football club's stadium Anfield. Photo by PAUL ELLIS/AFP via Getty Images

Extraordinary tales, or would be If there wasn’t so much tragedy and Covid anguish going on.

Now they are just minor facets of a bigger struggle.

Sport, especially football, has learned its place.

Shankly was wrong. Football is not more important than life or death. Doubtless the father of the modern Liverpool FC would say the same in our current predicament.

But football is a huge affirmation that life can be good.

A collective pleasure, shared pain, community and allegiances that bring out the best - and occasionally the worst - of its followers.

Right now it’s hard to imagine how we get from lockdown to league games in the foreseeable future.

Football is not more important than life or death but it is a glorious distraction from both and can’t come back soon enough.

*Sad to hear of the death of Norman Hunter at the weekend.

Many tributes have been paid to his character and friendly nature - off the field.

On it he was the epitome of Don Revie's Leeds team of the 1960s and 70s, often brilliant, always competitive but laced throughout with cynicism and brutality.

This is not a myth.

Hunter was a hard man in a hard team but, of course, that was not the whole man.

He was manager at Rotherham United for two-and-a-half years and was able to give Star and Green Un reporter Les Payne a glimpse of the standards at the top of the game.

Les turned up at Millmoor the day the Millers came out of administration in May 1987 to speak to new chairman Ken Booth but the scribe had to wait. Hunter was on the pitch shooting into an empty goal.

The reporter joined him and ended up laying off passes for Hunter to smack in. Les was also acting as ballboy for those that Hunter fired wide and eventually ended up in goal.

The way Hunter hit a ball, the pace and power he could muster at the age of 42 was, according to the reporter, stunning.

He vowed never to complain about goalkeepers reactions again. Hunter was also whipping penalties into the corners with amazing force and accuracy.

Though he never took penalties in games in his career.

An eye-opener into the standards of a top pro for someone who played at a very good level in local football.

Hunter was sacked a few months later.