WHY SAY ANYTHING?

Some of you may have noticed that there hasn’t been much football on the television, (or anywhere else), recently.

Apparently this is because of some global pandemic which has managed, in one fell swoop, to do what non-football fans have been trying to do for years. It has all come to a shuddering halt. CR7 has been temporarily replaced by COVID19.

People are now in lockdown and finding out things about family members that they never knew! One man explained how his “house arrest” has resulted in a perfect opportunity for his wife to point out everything he has done wrong in the last 15 years.

Footballers meanwhile are staying fit, (or pretending to on the social media disgraces), by spending at least 5 minutes per day either kicking a toilet roll around the house or trying to beat a record number of exercise moves set by a fellow pro.

They are also looking at ways to help the various health services. In the main they prefer not to take a pay cut as this only helps their own club in having more money to spend on a potential replacement for the player trying to help. It also actually takes money away from the health service who would not receive their contribution on the portion of pay cut from the salary!

So the answer, apparently pioneered by Manchester United players, is to donate up to 30% of their salary directly to the NHS. This, of course, would not be necessary if the government funded the service properly or if Matt Hancock went cap in hand to some of his chums rather than expecting football to dig deep but hey, this is not a political site so that debate must be had elsewhere.

The big questions are: When will it all get back to normal? Will the season reach a conclusion or will it be scrapped? What happens if it is scrapped? Will Liverpool have to wait another 30 years before getting their next sniff at the title?

Could Liverpool yet miss out on the title? Everybody outside of the red half of Merseyside certainly hopes so!

Wiser folk than ourselves don’t know the answers to these questions so we won’t even attempt a reply. Suffice to say that, unless the season is completed then Liverpool CANNOT be given the title because, quite simply, they can still be caught. Yes, whilst highly unlikely, it is not beyond the realms of possibility that they could lose enough games and Manchester City could win enough games for the situation to change.

This has become particularly relevant just recently as Liverpool were knocked out of the Champion’s League, losing twice to Atlético Madrid, on either side of a 3-0 defeat by Watford!

As far as the restart goes and with the Bundesliga having planned to return in early May, there was hope here that the Premier League might do the same, but the chances of a return before June 1st are a long 7/1 according to SportsBettingDime. On a more optimistic note, the odds of the EPL concluding the season in some capacity are a short 1/5. So we’ll get to see out the season, but perhaps not until later into the summer.

The noises coming out of Spain are that the players should take their holidays now, (although quite where they are supposed to go is a bit of a mystery), because La Liga is looking at finishing the season even if it runs into August, meaning there would be a very short break before the new one begins.

And hats off to Barcelona who, not content with just one crisis, have managed to involve themselves in another after 6 directors resigned from the board citing the way the club was being run as their motivation. Here’s what The Guardian had to say.

Whatever happens, one thing is for sure, the world’s most popular game with it’s preening overpaid superstars will be welcomed back with open arms by the vast majority of supporters in virtually every country where it has any influence whatsoever, which is most of them.