Onslaught against football is cynical

EVEN though he was somewhat goaded into it, Matt Hancock need not have taken the bait. He could have risen above it, made clear that he has more pressing concerns and that he wasn’t there to provide an easy headline. Instead the UK government’s Health Secretary dove right in and stirred a pot that really didn’t need stirring.

Footballers, he declared, needed to take a pay cut and do their part during the COVID-19 crisis. It was a breathtakingly cynical and cheap thing the Health Secretary did, a fairly transparent attempt to deflect from the failures of his government in their preparation for and response to the global outbreak of this strain of cornoavirus.

Sorry Minister, but footballers didn’t create this crisis. They may be overpaid – they almost certainly are and we write this not to defend their inflated salaries rather to call out the cynicism of those seeking to scapegoat them now – but that really is neither here nor there when it comes to the crisis gripping the world.

Footballers didn’t put the National Health Service (NHS) through the biggest relative spending squeeze in history, that was you and your Tory colleagues, Mr Hancock. It wasn’t something you had to do either, it was a political choice, ideologically driven. It would have been perfectly possible to increase investment further given the historically low rates of interest, but you chose not to do so, dementedly chasing a balanced budget. You did that. Footballers didn’t. It wasn’t footballers who made a mess of the initial reaction to the crisis. It wasn’t footballers who used fundamentally flawed data to push the notion of herd immunity. It wasn’t footballers who waited too long to lock down the country. It wasn’t footballers who boasted about shaking hands with coronavirus patients from behind a government seal in 10 Downing Street, that was your party leader, Mr Hancock.

The worst part of all this is that Hancock’s gambit seems to have worked to a certain extent. Football does seem to be coming in for criticism – especially over the furlough scheme which may or may not be justified – but the idea the football owes some special responsibility is quite frankly bizarre. And, as we noted on these pages a few weeks back, footballers are doing their bit. Liverpool captain Jordan Henderson had been organising a joint-response from Premier League players long before Hancock tried to score his cheap political points. If Hancock tries to take credit for Henderson’s work then he really should be told where to go.