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At the historic oval near my inner-suburban home, the customary seasonal transition is in eerie abeyance.
The turf wicket would by now usually have been pockmarked by the boots of stampeding footballers and the goal posts erected.
Instead, the thin white posts remain in their storage pods near the cricket nets, while the turf square is sprouting autumnal grass, protected by high-tech security (a flimsy rope and two small "keep off" signs).
Workmen continue to install a new scoreboard that will display the achievements of suburban champs. But no one knows whether its luminous digits will first record goals and behinds, or runs and wickets.
The scene is no doubt similar at most country and suburban grounds, the sporting and social hubs of communities that now instead host determinedly sombre socially distanced workouts.
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Inevitably the media focus on the impact of the deadly coronavirus pandemic on sport has highlighted the deprivation of AFL and NRL matches and the sundry costs and contingencies.
Most recently we have been confronted by anxious administrators trying to stave off financial ruin by concocting ever more desperate measures to get players back on the field, even if playing on islands or in clusters would risk creating the potentially ruinous air of "normality" our political leaders have rightly suppressed.
Amid the huffing of these panic-stricken sporting bureaucrats and the unseemly haggling over the percentages to be cut from vast playing contracts, there has been a consoling thought.
Sport is not imperilled by the financial knock-ons from this deadly pandemic because sport is not merely what we see on the TV or in a packed stadium.
Sport at its most basic is a kid with a bat and ball or a racquet or just a pair of runners, regardless of where the evolution of various games through codification, professionalism, mass audience appeal and "elite performance" has taken them.
But even viewed through the rosiest lens, this does not mean the suburban warriors of community sport are immune from the havoc coronavirus has wrought at the professional levels.
When various national governing bodies tightened their stranglehold on the grassroots — in some cases for the greater good — sport became, even more so, a trickle-down economy.
So the loss of overall revenue generated through media rights, sponsorship and gate receipts will have a profound impact on how much support will be provided to suburban leagues and clubs.
Consequently, the likely sporting depression will provide a test of the priorities and the commitment of administrators to the most important level of sport — the community base that props up the sporting pyramid.
Funding for the loss-making women's professional leagues currently driving mass participation will provide a similar insight into their long-term vision.
At local level a flattened economy will have an immediate impact on community clubs that typically rely on sponsorship from the kind of small businesses — such as pubs, restaurants and real estate agents — that have taken the biggest financial hits.
The explosion in entry-level and early-age junior participation has also created a steady stream of revenue for many clubs and, in some cases, a heavy reliance on junior memberships to fund overall operations.
Will parents hard hit by the depressed economy continue to pay? Will kids return after a gap season in which they have formed an even greater bond with — you might say addiction to —their PlayStations and iPhones?
Will senior players who already struggled to come up with their subs — or even be able to pay them — return?
Most pertinently, will the governing bodies enjoying a generational benefit from the current participation boom fund their own form of stimulus package to help clubs ensure the now cash-strapped and disadvantaged can still play?
Grassroots clubs waiting to count cost of coronavirus
Football, particularly, has a bottom-to-top financial model that has imposed sometimes outlandish fees on juniors used to prop up senior teams and even Football Federation Australia itself.
This was a controversial topic before the pandemic and could now be — as much as the future of the A-League and W-League — a major source of vulnerability for the sport's continued growth.
Another key funding question for community clubs is whether government grants for infrastructure promised (and in some cases misappropriated) before the pandemic struck can still be delivered given the billions of taxpayer dollars allocated to wage relief and other emergency initiatives.
The provision of female change rooms has been a key focus of government grants, given the enormous growth in girl's and women's cricket, football and Australian rules particularly. The best hope might be that grants can still be justified in order to provide stimulus for the building industry.
Inevitably even the most prosperous local clubs will find themselves asking similar questions to their professional counterparts: Do they need to pay as much for that half-back or recruit the ex-first grade batsman who might have helped win a premiership?
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This might not be such a bad thing for those clubs who have been caught up in the inflated premiership-chasing cash-in-hand economy that distorts the raison d'etre of some even supposedly "amateur" clubs.
But during the hiatus it is the simple absence of the gathering of weekend tribes that will be felt most, particularly in those country towns where the people you see at the footy on Saturday afternoon might be the only ones you see all week.
For now, the new scoreboard near my house merely creates an impatience for the days when its numbers will, like the faces in front of the old grandstand, light up.
Offsiders will air a special on the impact of COVID-19 on community sport at 10:00am (AEST) on Sunday on ABC TV.
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Topics: sport, nrl, australian-football-league, covid-19, soccer, cricket, australia