It WILL be farcical – but won’t football be great!

one of the psychological ramifications of this unprecedented time will be for foreign players or managers to re-evaluate how long they want to spend away from their homeland?

Just thinking... as you do in lockdown.

Fair to say, Big Nev is no fan of Boris – nor of one of his former Everton managers.

Waving your team-mates away to form an orderly queue for the hand sanitiser? Tremendous. Now, it’s all about defending your advantage. Getting antibodies behind the ball. Sterile football? Maybe. But that’s what the Lockdown League® will be all about. Almost two months of football deprivation has made a mark, and my dilemma is surely most football fans’ dilemma. No, I don’t think professional football should be allowed any time soon, but – and I won’t admit it – won’t complain when it is. If players are prepared to expose themselves and their families to a very slightly increased risk then so be it. If the Government and its medical advisers allows a bio-secure freak show to go ahead, fair enough. Watching Kevin De Bruyne whisper to the football, watching Virgil van Dijk strut like some defensive god, watching Marcus Rashford sprint like the wind, watching Billy Gilmour redefine precocity, watching the topclass players in our game will be some sort of succour for the soul.

While I might not agree with it and want to be seen as not agreeing with it, at least the Lockdown League® would be a distraction from the days when the only classified results arrive courtesy of the Covid-19 death tolls.

But do not let anyone tell you that if football does actually restart, this is the Premier League being completed.

It is not. The Premier League season, in the manner in which it started, is finished. Destroyed. Without a winner, without losers. A resumption in June will not be a resumption. It will be the start of the made-for-tv Lockdown League®.

But after so long without seeing a ball kicked, there are probably many of us – secretly, guiltily, against our consciences – who cannot wait.

BRIGHTON’S Glenn Murray (right) thinks it would be “farcical” if players were forced to wear face masks in training. Well, no one thinks it farcical when players wear face masks to protect a broken nose or cheekbone. So just think of it as helping to protect something more important than that.