COLUMN: Playing loos! How the sports-mad are getting their fix during the coronavirus

From the toilet roll challenge to fruit snooker...
Lionel Messi. Photo: GettyImagesLionel Messi. Photo: GettyImages
Lionel Messi. Photo: GettyImages

I suppose I should start with the toilet rolls. After all, the panic buyers did.

With sport currently suspended in this country and beyond, athletes and the general public have needed their fix somehow.

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And the mixture of social media and stockpiled household goods has seen the birth of a brilliant new craze - the toilet roll challenge.

The premise is simple, set your smartphone to record and film yourself attempting to do as many keepy uppies with bog paper as possible before it hits the ground.

It’s simple, effective and provides a lovely angle in making light of this spring’s must-have shopping fad.

A number of top sports stars have got in on the act, Lionel Messi and Chelsea Ladies’ Ramona Bachmann among those teasing us with skills so silky you can almost find yourself forgiving them for filming in portrait.

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Hard-tackling Brazilian Felipe Melo played to his strengths by discarding the frills, putting his paper on the floor and smashing it with a two footed-tackle.

Pundit Jamie Carragher’s style was similar to his days in defence with Liverpool, making sure the danger was averted with as few touches as possible, while Rugby League star Mark Sneyd, of Hull FC, went one better and finished off by booting his toilet paper into an outside basketball hoop.

Ok, it’s not quite an afternoon on the terraces watching your team, where toilet rolls used to be stockpiled to be lobbed onto the pitch - but proof nonetheless that the insatiable appetite for sport - and fun - remains, no matter how gloomy the outside world.

But this isn’t the only way to get a sporting fix.

If you’re Ronnie O’Sullivan you probably have all the kit you need at home. But it’s not the case for everyone.

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Manchester United defender Eric Bailly shared a video of him training in his garden... helped by his kids.

Newspapers, meanwhile, have taken to filling their websites in different ways, such as minute-by-minute coverage of classic games or reporters starting up careers on video games and blogging how it goes.

A mate of mine saw what was coming and ordered himself a darts board with all the trimmings (he’s getting better and I’m getting too many regular updates).

Former Macclesfield striker Steve Burr went one better and used toilet paper to create rugby posts, booting the roll through for three points while also emptying his fruit bowl onto the dining room table and using his broom handle for an impomptu game of snooker.

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Yes, sport means that much to people that it thrives even when there is none.

If German and British soldiers can muster up a kickabout in no-man’s land midway through a war then nobody’s going to look down on a bit of Andrex hoofing during a global pandemic are they?

If anything, it’s a fantastic advert for the human spirit and the refusal to give in, even in the face of such terrifying adversity.

We hope this virus can be beaten. We hope this can happen with as few casualties as possible. We hope life can return to as close to normal as soon as possible.

But in the meantime, let’s celebrate the ones keeping their - and others’ - spirits up with a bit of good, clean sporting fun... with the emphasis very much on clean!

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