Football could kill people; is it still worth it?

Football could kill people. It’s that simple. Still want to see it return? Mail theeditor@football365.com

The stark truth
Right. That’s it. Sunday’s mailbox has just pushed me over the edge. We have ‘Colinger’ discussing how the PL could be resolved with games being played. We have a bizarre mail from Roode who wonders whether players would still be ‘scared’ of playing football during a pandemic if there was a trophy in sight. He goes on to talk about how ‘risk’ could be reduced whilst playing games behind closed doors which is oh so brave of him when he, personally, wouldn’t be exposed to the same risk.

But my favourite is the mail from Neil, LFC, Malta who points out that the island he lives on currently has just two new cases of COVID-19 per day. Then, with an absence of any obvious sarcasm, he goes on to suggest that the importation of hundreds (if not thousands) of people into this safe haven who, necessarily, will contain asymptomatic carriers, is a great idea.

And for what? So we can watch footy on TV to alleviate our boredom in lockdown? So your team can win a pot or avoid relegation? So your team can win a place in a European competition next season or promotion to the next league above you?

I will be kind and say that all three are either in wilful denial or just plain ignorant of what is going on around them. Let’s be crystal clear. The ‘risk’ involved in playing football matches right now isn’t that somebody might catch a bit of a cold or cop a dose of the runs. It is that people will die. Not could or might. People will die. Players, kit-men, coaches, physios, cameramen, ground staff, coach drivers, sound operators, the list goes on and on.

What if I told you that the pandemic will mean that 60% of all PL and EFL clubs will go bust before the autumn? But also, that I had a magic wand and I could prevent that happening at the cost of one single life. The catch? That the life to be ended is your Mother/Father/Wife/Husband/Son or daughter.

Everything needs to have perspective. Having spent my entire adult life in both the Army and the Police, I never tire of people keen to posit opinions when their own experience of absolutely genuine life-threatening-Oh-My-God-This-Is-It situations has been either limited or non-existent.

At the time of writing, we in the UK are just short of 30,000 deaths from this disgusting virus. That’s 30,000 grieving families who, frankly, couldn’t give two f*cks whether Leeds get promoted, Villa get relegated or Liverpool win the Prem.

Football is massively important to those of us that come back to this (brilliant) site day after day. Personally, I’ve avoided weddings and birthdays etc where I knew they conflicted with either a City or England match (I’ve done worse but am too ashamed to say so on here!). Ultimately however, football is not more important than a single person’s life and ‘we’ should not be gambling on such just because the alternative is that the club you’ve loved all your life may suffer or even cease to exist.

If you disagree then, I will respectfully suggest, you haven’t been standing outside your front door every Thursday evening or, if you have, you’ve been missing the point of all that clapping rather spectacularly.

Hope this finds you and your loved ones all safe and well.
Mark (No attempts at humour on this one) MCFC

And the season is already dead
I am getting sick to the back teeth now of reading the never-ending proposals thought up on a daily basis in a desperate attempt to get the 19/20 league campaign boxed off. Every one more desperate than the last.

The league, as it was, is dead. It died a long time ago and nothing that is cooked up in a committee room is going to change that. Anything proposed is going to be so far removed from the original competition it begs the question ‘what is the point?’. But, we all know what the point is, money. The desperation to complete the campaign has nothing to do with winners or losers but who will gain and who will lose the most money and, as usual, it’s the smaller clubs who lose out, massively.

The fairest way to make this work, for all clubs, is void the league. Anything else is just a vanity project. And yes, I understand Liverpool miss out on a trophy that was almost certainly destined for Anfield, but the whole football ladder should not be forced into a meaningless compromise to appease one club. Just give them the trophy, they would probably have won it anyway so give it to them and end this farce. This is more about the survival of many clubs who are on the brink of disappearing altogether. To be relegated on an even footing from a league that still has its integrity intact with the prospect of revenues still coming in in a lower league is one thing, but to be relegated from a sham of a competition with the prospect of no revenue coming in for who knows how long, is unacceptable.

Void the league, the football ‘family’ look after it’s own, and let’s look forward to a fresh start when all this is over, instead of clinging onto something that died a long time ago.
Andy Race

…I’ve been thinking about any potential eventual restart of the football season. And then realised that I actually couldn’t tell you which position in the league my team was, how many points they had, how many games they had left to play, who they’d already played home or away and who they had left to play and where.

I mean, I could recall very vague approximations but I really couldn’t remember any detail at all.

So ask yourself the same question, and answer it honestly – do you clearly remember you league position, your points tally, who and where you’d already played?

I suspect supporters of a handful of teams will have clear answers (Liverpool and Norwich undoubtedly, and that is in no way at all a dig).

But if most of us really can’t clearly remember where the season was it before football stopped, can you honestly justify starting up again? If you can’t remember what came before, really what is the point?

To be clear, I’m not trying to create polemic here. I just realised that any attachment I had to this season has basically been lost in the relatively short seeds of time.

Interested to know your thoughts.
Nick

Finishing the season: Options
Okay, I’ve been thinking about this for the past couple of days and here’s where I’m at with respect to finishing the league season:

Option A:

1. Put it to a vote between the remaining 19 clubs to decide whether to award Liverpool the title or not.
This way, nobody complains 10 years later regarding the decision taken by the Premier League without consulting them.
Now we know from interviews given by most of the players like Rudiger that they would be totally fine with awarding Liverpool the title since no one would deny that they were going to go on and win it anyway.

2. Do NOT relegate any of the clubs. Instead, promote Leeds United and West Bromwich Albion to the Premier League and relegate five teams next season.
Yes, this would cause an additional few games to be played especially since the Euros are scheduled next year and could cause some complexities in the schedule but this would be the least unfair way to settle the relegation/promotion dilemma.

3. Arrange play-offs between the existing 4th, 5th, 6th and 7th placed teams.
The biggest dilemma, for me, was how to handle the Champions league places. Sadly, I see no other way apart from scheduling playoffs between the above mentioned teams.
Of course, this needs to be done in a neutral venue and not home and away which means it will be a ‘sudden death’ match between 4th vs 5th and 6th vs 7th and then a final would be held between the victors. (I am not offering a solution for Europa league here but it could also be dealt with by letting the losers of round 1 and round 2 play each other)

Option B:

Settle everything via merit or Points per game.
29 games have been played and it is a decent enough sample size to figure out which team would have won the title (Liverpool) and do the same for the other teams to award top four and relegation spots.

Option C :

Null and void
Not at all a fan of this one.
29 games have been played this season, not 9 or 10. This season was almost completed before the outbreak and hence, voiding it after all the hard work most teams have done for pretty much the whole season, would be very unfair.
Sri (India)

What if we can’t start football again until February…
I’m a Brit living in Hong Kong and have been through quite the cycle with COVID-19 – initial concern about the grotesque handling of the virus on the Mainland which endangered the rest of the world, worry about the impact on HK, but now we’re finally coming through the other side thanks to the prompt response from the usually inept regional government (although at a cost – my kids have been off school since January). With virtually zero new cases over the last week HK would be a great place to finish the PL season, but sadly the HK government’s international reputation is in tatters due to the ongoing brutal repression of students and innocent pro-democracy protesters.

Anyway, enjoyed Waleed Almasri and Yaru Malyasia’s chatter about when to decide the 2019/20 can’t be completed. They postulate November could be time to kick off the 2020/21 season and we need to prioritise that. What on earth makes anyone think that could be possible, looking at the human traffic in B&Q every day. What if the next season can’t start til January, or February, or March next year, which seems perfectly plausible to me. We’d be very silly writing off this season, when next season could well go the same way.
Mark, LFC, Hong Kong

Fanmail for LA Steve
Not sure why Steve from LA has his panties in a twist but he needs to calm down. Are you related to Mike Dean or Mike Riley by any chance?

What I hope to ‘achieve’ by interviewing the referees is quite simply really – they might actually try and do a wee better job especially when they know they are going to be asked about their potentially controversial or calamitous decisions a few minutes later?

Make no mistake, this does not necessarily mean the incompetent referees in EPL will magically turn out to be Pierluigi Collina but hey…

By the way, when players and managers are interviewed after a game, do their mistakes or red cards suddenly disappear? And yet why do they get interviewed? The same logic applies here to referees – I don’t want the refs to be interviewed just so they can magically make 100% perfect decisions all the time but there needs to be some goddamn accountability.

When you consider that pretty much everyone else on a football pitch is held accountable at least to some extent and only refs seem to get away with it scot-free, it doesn’t sit well.
Bucky Dent (Bangalore, India)

…Steve, you need to calm down, you seem to have got so confused and angry that you agreed and disagreed with me at the same time.

Firstly, I meant adverts during halftime and pregame as they currently are (not extra ones as you seem to be suggesting, don’t think it was that much of a leap to understand that) with the option of not having them if you watch the game on demand. The original emailer suggested that if you’re paying for a subscription a la Netflix for the PL, you wouldn’t necessarily want adverts, I just meant I personally wouldn’t mind them if the game being shown is live, if it means my subscription costs aren’t through the roof.

Secondly, I perfectly understand what Redzone is, as I am a very keen NFL fan. I was suggesting it as an additional programme to the live games. You may not know, but we have at least two very successful programmes in the UK during the 3pm blackouts that flits between commentators at the games describing the action. Some people may not be particularly interested in any one of the games and may prefer to get the action from all of the games as and when it happens – basically Soccer Saturday with highlights. Amazon even understand this as they let you view multiple games at once.

Also, I never said I preferred it, I just happen to realise that something I may like, may not be to everyone’s taste and other options should be suggested, something you seem incapable of.

I know this lockdown is hard, but I suggest you get on a Zoom call with one of your mates asap as you seem unnecessarily angry.
Adam, Midlands

Politics and football
I’ll keep it brief, how are Gazza playing his invisible flute, or James McClean exercising his freedom, not on ‘Ten times football and politics mixed terribly‘? It’s like leaving Hendrix and Clapton out of a top 10 guitarists list.
Edwin Ambrose