Ciarán Murphy: Blindsided by a Super Sunday of Covid, chaos and controversy

At one stage last Sunday afternoon, it seemed the sports world had decided en-masse to lose its collective mind.

On three TV channels pretty much simultaneously, we had the fall-out from the most ridiculous Formula One race I’d seen this century (which also happened to be the *first* formula 1 race I’d seen this century); Munster and Wasps were playing a Champions Cup game without 59 first team players; and Loughmore-Castleiney were suffering at the hands of a series of seemingly bizarre refereeing decisions that were robbing them of their most precious commodity, McGraths, at a rate of about one per half.

Saturdays are allowed to lose the run of themselves, or at least they used to be. Sundays are predictable. Sundays are boring. And that’s how I like it.

I will watch a GAA game on TG4. I will watch a Premier League game on Sky Sports. If there is a rugby game on with a bit of spice to it, I will watch that.

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I will quietly steel myself for the week of work. I will studiously avoid emails relating to that week of work. And that is really all I’m able for on the Lord’s day.

So watching the Formula One was already a major departure from the norm. What actually transpired has already been widely disseminated, but a short summary is nevertheless painfully necessary.

The top two in the Drivers’ Championship were tied on equal points. One of them, Max Verstappen, had in the past displayed a general enthusiasm for the possibility of maybe, perhaps, if the opportunity presented itself, running his opponent Lewis Hamilton off the road. If he did so again, he would be the world champion by virtue of having won a greater number of races.

I’m obviously no expert, but this is the sort of jargon-free scenario I could get on board with. In fact, running your opponent off the road is pretty much the only manoeuvre I would back myself to pull off in a Formula One car, six or seven times out of 10.

They very nearly crashed on the first lap, then settled into some pretty straight forward racing. Hamilton eased into the lead, and was cruising to victory with Verstappen powerless in a slower car in second place, until the last five laps, when a crash on the track precipitated a series of events which seem far too complicated to discuss here. . . and yet, we must.

That crash brought out the safety car, which immediately closed the gap between the two protagonists from 10 seconds to one. To further sweeten the pill, the race director made the frankly ludicrous decision to clear the road between the top two by allowing the four lapped cars between them to get out of the way, to allow one last lap of clear racing between the two to decide the entire season.

So was this world title decided by someone thinking like a race director, or a film director?

Verstappen had taken advantage of the safety car to get a new set of tyres on, Hamilton had been on his for over 30 laps, and that was all she wrote - Verstappen overtook him, and became world champion. The racing had been sensational, but just as sensational had been the intervention of the race director Michael Masi.

I have ignored Formula One for the last 20 years, but many people were convinced to revive their interest in the sport after a behind-the-scenes Netflix documentary series called Drive To Survive became a massive success.

I remained immune to the documentary’s charms, but the idea of a last-race battle to the chequered flag got me in the end. This explosion in interest obviously didn’t escape the attention of Formula One. So was this world title decided by someone thinking like a race director, or a film director?

Giving the people (and by that I mean people like me, who hadn’t cared enough about the efforts of the sportspeople involved to have watched a single second of it until this week) the showdown they tuned in for is box office. . . but is it fair?

Every sport in the world is currently trying to replicate F1’s success with Netflix. But not every other sport is basically Succession on wheels, a playground for people who are far too rich to begin with, where the cash spent on building the car is at least as important a factor as the quality of the man (and it was still exclusively men in the 2021 season) behind the wheel.

In that atmosphere, it is perhaps hard to have to too much sympathy for a team like Mercedes when they cry foul.

True contest

After that drama, I switched over to Munster against Wasps, both of whom are missing almost two whole teams each, through illness, Covid and injury.

When one team had the majority of their squad in a different hemisphere for most of the build-up, and the other is so under-prepared they were practising their lineouts in the tunnel before the game, it’s hard to say that what we saw was a true contest.

It’s a credit to both clubs that it went ahead at all, but the red lights are already flashing ahead of Leinster - Montpellier this weekend, and the idea of a truly fair and equitable Champions Cup is in tatters after only one week.

In light of all that, Loughmore-Castleiney’s woes look like pretty small beans. They turned up with a couple of late withdrawals, they played the game, some refereeing decisions (questionable for sure, but not egregious in my view) went against them, and their magnificent run is ended by a Ballygunner team that will take some stopping.

As long as there are human beings involved, fairness will always be an inexact science. On a weekend that saw the rulebook thrown out in favour of the narrative, and Covid cancelling football games and upturning rugby teams’ preparations, the poor old referee might be the least of one’s worries.