And they're off. Live sport returns in Ireland today for the first time since March, and it comes in the form of an eight-race flat card at Naas. The racing begins behind closed doors at 2.55pm, and kicks off a week which builds up to the opening Classics of the Irish season - the 2,000 and 1,000 Guineas - at the Curragh on Friday and Saturday. With the rest of Irish sport still shut down racing has the stage to itself - and this morning Brian O'Connor asks if it can capitalise by drawing in new fans. He writes: "Finding new fans and converts is only possible if there's a chance to check it out in the first place. It's how many of us with no link to the horses whatsoever first caught the racing bug. So this is a fascinating experiment in just how malleable the public is when it comes to their sporting diet: is greater appreciation really just down to greater exposure." Meanwhile it is only a week since the resumption of UK racing but Aidan O'Brien has already landed his first big win of the summer, after Love tore the field apart to take the 1,000 Guineas at Newmarket yesterday.
Elsewhere in his column this morning Ken Early gives his verdict on the use of artificial crowd noise during fixtures played behind closed doors, with the Premier League to offer it as an option to viewers when it resumes next week. And after watching it used during an NRL match between North Queensland and the Cronulla Sharks, it's a thumbs down. He writes: "Three minutes or so of NRL action were enough to tell me that I can do without simulated crowd noise. Nobody likes the empty echoes at these ghost games. In the silence, bathos seeps into everything, forcing a reckoning with the game's essential unimportance. The hollow soundscape is altogether too redolent of the void that football is usually so good at distracting us from."
The return of racing today is good news for bookmakers, and Ruaidhrí Croke has looked at changes which could be coming to the gambling industry in Ireland - one he suggests has long been "woefully under-regulated." Fianna Fáil are looking to clamp down on the gambling industry if they form part of the next Government, and he writes: "For an industry that is estimated to produce a gross revenue of over €1 billion a year in Ireland it is astonishing that it remains regulated only by those within the industry."
The IRFU are expected to join the English RFU by lobbying the Government to reducing physical distancing from two metres to one metre in line with WHO guidelines. This would dramatically increase the number of supporters allowed into stadiums such as the Aviva, when this is allowed again.
And Conor McGregor announced his retirement from the UFC on Twitter yesterday afternoon. McGregor's previous retirements from the octagon came in 2016 and 2019.
