Cute dogs, Kalvin Phillips' smile and TikTok dances, bored Leeds United stars still have lots to give - Daniel Chapman

The football highlight of the locked-down weekend was not a scintillating game from the archives, or complicit viewing of the irresponsibly ongoing Belarusian Premier League.

It was Kalvin Phillips and his partner Ashleigh, with a cast of improbably cute, wiggling dogs, dancing for 15 seconds on TikTok to Tyga’s ‘Bored In The House’.

Over on Instagram you can watch Jackie Harrison’s physical indoor mission to become the first player Marcelo Bielsa has ever told to maybe slow down? A bit? Before you take this fitness thing a bit too far? He’s showing a level of dedication that deserves Premier League status, especially when compared to, choosing an example completely at random, Aston Villa’s Jack – never Jackie – Grealish.

But TikTok is downtime, where Kalvin and Ashleigh are doing the old City Varieties music hall routine of pretending to dance with your partner’s legs, like 500,000 others on the app; or collapsing on the floor in giggles when the plank challenge, attempted by 3.9 million before them, goes wrong.

TikTok is the perfect app for these times, where people record short videos inventing challenges and skits or reinterpreting others, hoping theirs will be the one that, in bitterly ironic terms, goes viral. All you need is a smartphone: it’s the perfect indoorsy boredom buster.

We shouldn’t forget that boredom is a luxury. If all we each suffer from the coronavirus is an abundance of spare time, we’ll be the lucky ones. But boredom is also boring, and it’s also spreading.

The coronavirus doesn’t discriminate between young or old, rich or poor, footballer or not. If it can get close enough, say within two metres, it will take any chance of moving on.

Against the fight to stop that spread, Covid-19 has taken boredom as its partner in crime: the longer we spend apart to stop the virus spreading, the farther boredom will travel in its place, apparently harmless until it exhausts us into coming together again, even just a little, ‘for a treat’, before it’s safe.

Be careful of Covid-19, but mind how you go with boredom, too. Endless vistas of unoccupied hours are attractive in theory but can be harmful to mental health.

A few years ago I spoke to Leeds Rhinos’ Stevie Ward about how he became determined that his second major injury wouldn’t repeat the dark hours of his first, when he couldn’t be in the successful team he was supposed to be part of and kept asking himself, what’s the point of a rugby player who can’t play rugby? His answer was to become something else as well, starting an online magazine and podcast called Mantality, becoming an advocate for conversations about mental health. Injuries – and Stevie’s had more than his fair share – no longer meant empty days.

For a lot of players, the sporting shutdown will be familiar from spells on the sidelines. They spend weeks in treatment rooms doing solitary fitness work, aiming for the target of being on the field again, kicking or throwing the ball.

The difference now is that someone has hidden the target. There isn’t a knee to heal or a kick-off to aim for, nothing a player can control that will put them on the pitch again. April 30 restart, wait 12 weeks, a summer league, scrapping the season: like anyone on furlough or working as best they can from home, footballers are waiting and hoping to hear when something like their old life might return. At Leeds United, where promotion is in the balance, that has brought the players into the fans’ world.

It’s the supporters’ struggle that, no matter how much we sing and cheer and shout, or what superstitious routines we follow, the fate we pin so much hope on is outside our influence.

Only the players could get Leeds United promoted.

Until now.

Now, nothing they can do has any influence either. It’s the least-expected turn in our long wait for the Premier League: for the players to come to the sidelines and join us, watching and waiting and as powerless to score goals and win points as you or me.

At least we’re together, which is where social media was supposed to put us. It’s taken a global pandemic to remind a lot of people that the apps they’ve been using to scream at strangers can also bring people closer together.

Positive ideas can spread, like applauding NHS workers; hopefully followed by ideas like proper resources, higher wages, shorter shifts.

Last week’s decision by Leeds United’s players and staff to defer their wages to ensure all the club’s workers continue getting paid, demonstrated a rising empathy matching Billy Bremner’s motto of ‘Side Before Self’, and empathy will be needed in the coming weeks of separation. As will cute dogs, Kalvin’s smile and dancing when we can. A bored footballer, learning what it’s like to watch and hope, still has a lot to give.