Editorial
Authors: Saunders John 
Published: June 2020

Covid 19 – living the experience

As I sit at my desk at home in suburban Brisbane, following the dictates on self-isolation
shared with so many around the world, I am forced to contemplate the limits of human
prediction. I look out on a world which few could have predicted six months ago. My
thoughts at that time were all about 2020 as a metaphor for perfect vision and a plea for
it to herald a new period of clarity which would arm us in resolving the whole host of
false divisions that surrounded us. False, because so many appear to be generated by the
use of polarised labelling strategies which sought to categorise humans by a whole range
of identities, while losing the essential humanity and individuality which we all share.
This was a troublesome trend and one which seemed reminiscent of the biblical tale
concerning the tower of Babel, when a single unified language was what we needed to
create harmony in a globalising world.

However, yesterday’s concerns have, at least for the moment, been overshadowed
by a more urgent and unifying concern with humanity’s health and wellbeing. For now,
this concern has created a world which we would not have recognised in 2019. We rely
more than ever on our various forms of electronic media to beam instant shots of the
streets of London, New York, Berlin, Paris, Hong Kong etc. These centres of our
worldly activity normally characterised by hustle and bustle, are now serenely peaceful
and ordered. Their magnificent buildings have become foregrounded, assuming a
dignity and presence that is more commonly overshadowed by the mad ceaseless
scramble of humanity all around them. From there however the cameras can jump to
some of the less fortunate areas of the globe. These streets are still teeming with people
in close confined areas. There is little hope here of following frequent extended hand
washing practices, let alone achieving the social distance prescribed to those of us in the
global North.

From this desk top perspective, it has been interesting to chart the mood as the crisis
has unfolded. It has moved from a slightly distant sense of superiority as the news slowly
unfolded about events in remote Wuhan. The explanation that the origins were from a
live market, where customs unfamiliar to our hygienic pre-packaged approach to food
consumption were practised, added to this sense of separateness and exoticism
surrounding the source and initial development of the virus. However, this changed to a
growing sense of concern as its growth and transmission slowly began to reveal the
vulnerability of all cultures to its spread. At this early stage, countries who took steps to
limit travel from infected areas seemed to gain some advantage. Australia, as just one
example banned flights from China and required all Chinese students coming to study
in Australia to self-isolate for two weeks in a third intermediate port. It was a step that
had considerable economic costs associated with it. One that was vociferously resisted
at the time by the university sector increasingly dependent on the revenue generated by
servicing Chinese students. But it was when the epicentre moved to northern Italy, that
the entire messaging around the event began to change internationally. At this time the
tone became increasingly fearful, anxious and urgent as reports of overwhelmed
hospitals and mass burials began to dominate the news. Consequently, governments
attracted little criticism but were rather widely supported in the action of radically
closing down their countries in order to limit human interaction. The debate had become
one around the choice between health and economic wellbeing. The fact that the
decision has been overwhelmingly for health, has been encouraging. It has not however
stopped the pressure from those who believe that economic well-being is a determinant of human well-being, questioning the decisions of politicians and the advice of public
health scientists that have dominated the responses to date. At this stage, the lives versus
livelihoods debate has a long way still to run.

Of some particular interest has been the musings of the opinion writers who have
predicted that the events of these last months will change our world forever. Some of
these predictions have included the idea that rather than piling into common office
spaces working remotely from home and other advantageous locations will be here to
stay. Schools and universities will become centres of learning more conveniently
accessed on-line rather than face to face. Many shopping centres will become redundant
and goods will increasingly be delivered via collection centres or couriers direct to the
home. Social distancing will impact our consumption of entertainment at common
venues and lifestyle events such as dining out. At the macro level, it has been predicted
that globalisation in its present form will be reversed. The pandemic has led to actions
being taken at national levels and movement being controlled by the strengthening and
increased control of physical borders. Tourism has ground to a halt and may not resume
on its current scale or in its present form as unnecessary travel, at least across borders,
will become permanently reduced. Advocates of change have pointed to some of the
unpredicted benefits that have been occurring. These include a drop in air pollution:
increased interaction within families; more reading undertaken by younger adults; more
systematic incorporation of exercise into daily life, and; a rediscovered sense of
community with many initiatives paying tribute to the health and essential services
workers who have been placed at the forefront of this latest struggle with nature.

Of course, for all those who point to benefits in the forced lifestyle changes we have
been experiencing, there are those who would tell a contrary tale. Demonstrations in the
US have led the push by those who just want things to get back to normal as quickly as
possible. For this group, confinement at home creates more problems. These may be a
function of the proximity of modern cramped living quarters, today’s crowded city life,
dysfunctional relationships, the boredom of self-entertainment or simply the anxiety that
comes with an insecure livelihood and an unclear future.

Personally however, I am left with two significant questions about our future
stimulated by the events that have been ushered in by 2020. The first is how is it that the
world has been caught so unprepared by this pandemic? The second is to what extent
do we have the ability to recalibrate our current practices and view an alternative future?
In considering the first, it has been enlightening to observe the extent to which
politicians have turned to scientific expertise in order to determine their actions. Terms
like ‘flattening the curve’, ‘community transmission rates’, have become part of our
daily lexicon as the statistical modellers advance their predictions as to how the disease
will spread and impact on our health systems. The fact that scientists are presented as
the acceptable and credible authority and the basis for our actions reflects a growing
dependency on data and modelling that has infused our society generally. This
acceptance has been used to strengthen the actions on behalf of the human lives first and
foremost position. For those who pursue the livelihoods argument even bigger figures
are available to be thrown about. These relate to concepts such as numbers of jobless,
increase in national debt, growth in domestic violence, rise in mental illness etc.
However, given that they are more clearly estimates and based on less certain
assumptions and variables, they do not at this stage seem to carry the impact of the data
produced by public health experts. This is not surprising but perhaps not justifiable when
we consider the failure of the public health lobby to adequately prepare or forewarn us
of the current crisis in the first place. Statistical predictive models are built around
historical data, yet their accuracy depends upon the quality of those data. Their robustness for extrapolation to new settings for example will differ as these differ in a
multitude of subtle ways from the contexts in which they were initially gathered. Our
often uncritical dependence upon ‘scientific’ processes has become worrying, given that
as humans, even when guided by such useful tools, we still tend to repeat mistakes or
ignore warnings. At such a time it is an opportunity for us to return to the reservoir of
human wisdom to be found in places such as our great literature. Works such as The
Plague by Albert Camus make fascinating and educative reading for us at this time. As
the writer observes

Everybody knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world, yet
somehow, we find it hard to believe in ones that crash down on our heads
from a blue sky. There have been as many plagues as wars in history, yet
always plagues and wars take people equally by surprise.

So it is that we constantly fail to study let alone learn the lessons of history. Yet
2020 mirrors 1919, as at that time the world was reeling with the impact of the Spanish
‘Flu, which infected 500 million people and killed an estimated 50 million. This was
more than the 40 million casualties of the four years of the preceding Great War. There
have of course been other pestilences since then and much more recently. Is our stubborn
failure to learn because we fail to value history and the knowledge of our forebears? Yet
we can accept with so little question the accuracy of predictions based on numbers, even
with varying and unquestioned levels of validity and reliability.

As to the second question, many writers have been observing some beneficial
changes in our behaviour and our environment, which have emerged in association with
this sudden break in our normal patterns of activity. It has given us the excuse to reevaluate
some of our practices and identify some clear benefits that have been occurring.
As Australian newspaper columnist Bernard Salt observes in an article titled “the end
of narcissism?”

I think we’ve been re-evaluating the entire contribution/reward equation
since the summer bushfires and now, with the added experience of the
pandemic, we can see the shallowness of the so-called glamour professions –
the celebrities, the influencers. We appreciate the selflessness of volunteer
firefighters, of healthcare workers and supermarket staff. From the
pandemic’s earliest days, glib forays into social media by celebrities seeking
attention and yet further adulation have been met with stony disapproval.
Perhaps it is best that they stay offline while our real heroes do the heavy
lifting.

To this sad unquestioning adherence to both scientism and narcissism, we can add
and stir the framing of the climate rebellion and a myriad of familiar ‘first world’
problems which have caused dissension and disharmony in our communities. Now with
an external threat on which to focus our attention, there has been a short lull in the
endless bickering and petty point scoring that has characterised our western liberal
democracies in the last decade. As Camus observed:

The one way of making people hang together is to give ‘em a spell of the plague.

So, the ceaseless din of the topics that have driven us apart has miraculously paused
for at least a moment. Does this then provide a unique opportunity for us together to
review our habitual postures and adopt a more conciliatory and harmonious communication style, take stock, critically evaluate and retune our approach to life – as
individuals, as nations, as a species? It is not too difficult to hypothesise futures driven
by the major issues that have driven us apart. Now, in our attempts to resist the virus,
we have given ourselves a glimpse of some of the very things the climate change
activists have wished to happen. With few planes in the air and the majority of cars off
the roads, we have already witnessed clearer and cleaner air. Working at home has freed
up the commuter driven traffic and left many people with more time to spend with their
family. Freed from the continuing throng of tourists, cities like Venice are regenerating
and cleansing themselves. This small preview of what a less travelled world might start
to look like surely has some attraction.

But of course, it does not come without cost. With the lack of tourism and the need
to work at home, jobs and livelihoods have started to change. As with any revolution
there are both winners and losers. The lockdown has distinguished starkly between
essential and non-essential workers. That represents a useful starting point from which
to assess what is truly of value in our way of life and what is peripheral as Salt made
clear.

This is a question that I would encourage readers to explore and to take forward
with them through the resolution of the current situation. However, on the basis that
educators are seen as providing essential services, now is the time to turn to the content
of our current volume. Once again, I direct you to the truly international range of our
contributors. They come from five different continents yet share a common focus on
one of the most popular of shared cultural experiences – sport. Unsurprisingly three of
our reviewed papers bring different insights to the world’s most widely shared sport of
all – football, or as it would be more easily recognised in some parts of the globe -
soccer. Leading these offerings is a comparison of fandom in Australia and China. The
story presented by Knijnk highlights the rise of the fanatical supporters known as the
ultras. The origin of the movement is traced to Italy, but it is one that claims allegiances
now around the world. Kniijnk identifies the movement’s progression into Australia and
China and, in pointing to its stance against the commercialisation of their sport by the
scions of big business, argues for its deeper political significance and its commitment
to the democratic ownership of sport.

Reflecting the increasing availability and use of data in our modern societies,
Karadog, Parim and Cene apply some of the immense data collected on and around the
FIFA World Cup to the task of selecting the best team from the 2018 tournament held
in Russia, a task more usually undertaken by panels of experts. Mindful of the value of
using data in ways that can assist future decision making, rather than just in terms of
summarising past events, they also use the statistics available to undertake a second task.
The second task was the selection of the team with the greatest future potential by
limiting eligibility to those at an early stage in their careers, namely younger than 28
and who arguably had still to attain their prime as well as having a longer career still
ahead of them. The results for both selections confirm how membership of the wealthy
European based teams holds the path to success and recognition at the global level no
matter what the national origins of players might be.

Thirdly, taking links between the sport and the world of finance a step further,
Gomez-Martinez, Marques-Bogliani and Paule-Vianez report on an interesting study
designed to test the hypothesis that sporting success within a community is reflected in
positive economic outcomes for members of that community. They make a bold attempt
to test their hypothesis by examining the relationship of the performance of three world
leading clubs in Europe - Bayern Munich, Juventus and Paris Saint Germain and the
performance of their local stock markets. Their findings make for some interesting thoughts about the significance of sport in the global economy and beyond into the
political landscape of our interconnected world. Our final paper comes from Africa but
for its subject matter looks to a different sport, one that rules the subcontinent of India -
cricket. Norrbhai questions the traditional coaching of batting in cricket by examining
the backlift techniques of the top players in the Indian Premier league. His findings
suggest that even in this most traditional of sports, technique will develop and change
in response to the changing context provided by the game itself. In this case the context
is the short form of the game, introduced to provide faster paced entertainment in an
easily consumable time span. It provides a useful reminder how in sport, techniques will
not be static but will continue to evolve as the game that provides the context for the
skilled performance also evolves.

To conclude our pages, I must apologise that our usual book review has fallen prey to
the current world disruption. In its place I would like to draw your attention to the
announcement of a new publication which would make a worthy addition to the
bookshelf of any international sports scholar. “Softpower, Soccer, Supremacy – The
Chinese Dream” represents a unique and timely analysis of the movement of the most
popular and influential game in the world – Association Football, commonly
abbreviated to soccer - into the mainstream of Chinese national policy. The editorial
team led by one of sports histories most recognised scholars, Professor J A Mangan, has
assembled a who’s who of current scholars in sport in Asia. Together they provide a
perspective that takes in, not just the Chinese view of these important current
developments but also, the view of others in the geographical region. From Japan, Korea
and Australia, they bring with them significant experience to not just the beautiful game,
but sport in general in that dynamic and fast-growing part of the world. Particularly in
the light of the European dominance identified in the Karog, Parim and Cene paper this
work raises the question as to whether we can expect to see a change in the world order
sooner rather than later.

It remains for me to make one important acknowledgement. In my last editorial I
alerted you to the sorts of decisions we as an editorial and publication team were facing
with regard to ensuring the future of the journal. Debates as to how best to proceed while
staying true to our vision and goals are still proceeding. However, I am pleased to
acknowledge the sponsorship provided by The University of Macao for volume 42 and
recognise the invaluable contribution made by ISCPES former president Walter Ho to
this process. Sponsorship can provide an important input to the ongoing existence and
strength of this journal and we would be interested in talking to other institutions or
groups who might also be interested in supporting our work, particularly where their
goals align closely with ours.

May I therefore commend to you the works of our international scholars and
encourage your future involvement in sharing your interest in and expertise with others
in the world of comparative and international sport studies,
John Saunders, Brisbane, May 2020