The summer sports content was due to revolve around county cricket with many an hour intended to be spent at Edgbaston watching Warwickshire rather than following the successful conclusion of West Bromwich Albion 's promotion bid from the enforced position of in front of the telly. Although the initial cricket fixture list has been ripped up, a revised four day competition is due to start at the beginning of August. As part of the government's plan to explore ways of bringing some element of spectator attendance back to sporting events, the first two days of Warwickshire's home game versus Northamptonshire is one of the chosen pilot events to test socially distanced crowds. Therefore expect a couple of blog posts to re-live the experience of being a guinea pig, or from a more positive perspective, watching some cricket in person rather than on the small screen.
There are also tentative plans to bring back live music with some outdoor festivals starting to spring up in the dying embers of a curtailed British summer. One of these is Beardy Folk in Shropshire, an event attended for a day in 2018 and 2019, and now set to be joined by the Saturday of 2020. The original date in June was one of the early lockdown casualties, but the ambition of a September re-staging looks like paying off due to a relaxing of strict guidelines around the staging of live events in the presence of an audience.
So look out for three blog posts capturing the live experience in the next month or so. It is still unknown whether there will be too many more in 2020 as largish crowds in football and indoor gigs appear to be a long way off. Small steps are sometimes the most important.
UPDATE: County cricket spectator pilots for the weekend of 1st and 2nd August were cancelled as part of holding back on lockdown relaxing. So it looks like the spectator sporting summer is consigned to the bin. At this moment Beardy Folk Festival is still on. Watch this space.
