We’ve missed it of course and at least it will help what remains of the lockdown to be more bearable - providing you have a comfortable armchair and a remote control for the television set, especially this Saturday when there are four matches on the box in reasonably quick succession. The English Football League (EFL) begins again this weekend too, so appetites will be further satiated.

To the game’s authorities these must be bittersweet moments. Delight that football is back on its feet but secretly relieved that crowds will be absent. Why so, when the loss of revenue from the turnstiles will be massive? The answer is that matches will be trouble-free from crowd disturbances - something to be thankful for when you look around at what has been going on in the streets of English cities lately.

At least the destructive demos will not be easily transferred to football stadiums, which may well have been the case had the game been opened up to spectators. Matches would’ve been a handy excuse for an extension of the violence and thuggery we have witnessed in recent weeks, with yobbish mobs from left and right political spheres clashing with the police, desecrating and tearing down statues and generally running riot to make a mockery of the intended peaceful actions of those wanting a genuine and legitimate protest against the racism generated in the United States and sadly still proliferating in the United Kingdom.

Ironically, such protests in the UK could well be directed at football where institutional racism, unlike in many other sports, has failed lamentably to be eradicated.

Not only were there racist chants much in evidence during the season which now resumes, but the restart sees only six of the 91 managers of league clubs in England coming from black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) backgrounds.

Wolverhampton Wanderers’ Nuno Espírito Santo is the only one in the Premier League - astonishing when so many black players contribute substantially to the sport.

There are only a handful of black coaches but any black presence in boardrooms not only of clubs but the various Football Association and EFL hierarchies and committees is virtually non-existent.

We must hope that the enforced lull gave the game food for thought and an opportunity to take a step back and have a good look at itself. There has been much mouthing of platitudes but I would not bet on any revolution for some time yet.

As Emile Heskey, one of football’s most prominent black figures in recent years said this week: "Andy Cole can't get a job, Dwight Yorke can't get a job. Sol Campbell worked his socks off and how to go to the bottom of League Two and then the bottom of League One...

"You can go up and down in the boardroom and look. It is very hard to see many black people in any of them. It is about control. We don’t have anyone in there so we cannot affect that. You can’t challenge them if there is no one in there.

"We have got to drive change and that starts from within… If that means taking a knee before a game then why not? This is not going to harm the Premier League brand which everyone worries about."

There are many articulate, intelligent and rational voices among black personalities in football, including Heskey himself, John Barnes, Sol Campbell, Chris Hughton, Raheem Sterling and Marcus Rashford - witness his successful campaign to get the Government to do a U-turn today on the funding of school meals for needy children during the summer - who all have been both victims of racist abuse by supporters but who continue to speak up and refuse to be silent.

Ah yes, the racist supporters. Almost every week some have continued to throw verbal bananas. But why is it that only football breeds such ignorant louts? It is the only sport which has serious problems over inherent racism among certain fans.

I have covered the majority of sports in more than half a century in journalism, including quite a lot of boxing - which incidentally also resumes in teh UK soon with a Frank Warrren show from the BT Sport studio on July 10 - but in this country the only incident I can recall came 40 years ago when a British world middleweight champion, Alan Minter, who is white, declared before engaging in combat with the American Marvin Hagler that he would not "lose his title to a black man".

This infuriated Hagler, who belaboured him brutally and bloodily and ended the contest in three one-sided rounds. Some members of the National Front, who somehow had infiltrated the Wembley crowd, began raining down abuse - accompanied by banners, bottles, beer cans and chairs - upon him as he tried to leave the ring. The late BBC commentator Harry Carpenter declared later: "The Wembley Arena was reeking, not so much of nationalism but had a decidedly rancid smell of racialism." The promoter Mickey Duff publicly apologised to Hagler "on behalf of British boxing".

Since then boxing has an exemplary record when it comes to tolerance, with black fighters often given as much if not more support than their white opponents.

Friends who regularly attend rugby union matches tell me they have no recollection of any abuse of black players and from my own experience in covering athletics I can say that I have never heard any of black athletes. It is now probably the most internationally integrated sport of them all since the days of Jesse Owens.

And if a racist voice had ever been raised at Wimbledon against Arthur Ashe, Althea Gibson or the Williams sisters, or at Silverstone against Lewis Hamilton, there would be howls of outrage.

True, there are incidents of black athletes like Linford Christie, boxers including Lennox Lewis and Frank Bruno and a whole host of black footballers being pulled over by police simply because they were driving rather nice cars. Some have even been detained in cells overnight until their identity was proved when of course it was autographs and selfies all round please chaps from the then obsequious Old Bill.

But we live in hope that one day in football the racists will be silenced and black managers be given the opportunity to prove themselves. Since the start of last season more than a score of clubs have sacked their managers, ranging from Burton Albion to Arsenal via west Ham, Everton and a whole host more. Yet invariably their replacements have all been white despite a number applications from BAME candidates.

Little wonder that Raheem Sterling told Newsnight: "There's not a lot of faces that we can relate to and have conversations with. We have done a lot of talking and now it’s time to start implementing change."

Quite. Just as long as those who have been rampaging and creating havoc in these desperate times are kept out of football when the new normal, although surely it is more the abnormal, returns to a real normality. If it ever does.