There’s more hugging BEFORE a corner than after a goal

HERE is an idea. Let’s just finish the Premier League online.

Hermetically seal players in individual bubbles at home and they can play each other on FIFA, or whatever you call it. A lot of them seem to do that in their spare time anyway.

At least, then, they won’t be able to shake hands. Or hug each other, God forbid.

They won’t have curtain-twitchers grassing them up for getting too close, running to the Government and whingeing about social distancing.

We won’t have patronising, pompous MPs such as Nigel Huddleston – a sports minister who was unfamiliar with the Rooney Rule – lecturing footballers on how to behave.

“Covid-secure guidelines exist for football. Footballers must follow them and football authorities enforce them – strictly.”

Didn’t notice Nigel and his Tory mates kicking off when Dominic Cummings was on his law-breaking travels.

But we digress.

As soon as the Premier League and the professional game was given dispensation to resume and carry on, some of the clauses in Covid regulations were always going to be contravened. It was part of the deal.

I’m no mathematician, but when more than a dozen players are congregated in a six-yard box for a corner, it must be geometrically impossible to keep a social distance.

In fact, normally, there is more hugging BEFORE a corner is taken than there is after a goal has been scored from one.

These are also people who are tested at least twice a week and work in as bio-secure an environment as you could hope for. And what about rugby? What’s the difference between a hug and a tackle? Apart from the violence.

Half of this laughable faux angst about footballers celebrating goals comes back to the same, old, hoary chestnut.

Oh, they think they are special. Oh, they don’t want to abide by the rules.

Look, there are NO excuses for footballers flagrantly breaching Covid regulations off the field.

Those Spurs players and Manuel Lanzini, for example, deserved all the flak that went their way after posing at their Christmas get-together. Like it or not, they should be setting an example. But these are athletes getting changed three or four to a dressing room that would normally house a couple of dozen. What do you want them to do? Play in masks? Ban tackling? Marking? Sharing the same ball? It sounds incredibly trite – and it was something I was sceptical of at first – but the continuation of football has helped keep spirits up in large swathes of the community. And, as far as we know, there has not been a single player who has decided it is too risky to play. They may be extravagantly paid, but they have done us a favour. Some people in Government, such as Huddleston (left), are said to be concerned about the goal celebrations (like Manchester City, below). Maybe they should concern themselves with getting the vaccine out as quickly as possible to try to make up for their lamentable mishandling of this terrible crisis rather than fret over whether Marcus Rashford or Mo Salah is going to get a loving arm around the shoulder for scoring a late winner. If Rashford or Salah do score a late winner at Anfield on Sunday and manage to contain themselves in their moment of joy and celebrate within Covid guidelines, then great. Ideal. Well done. But if they don’t and they succumb to an embrace, big deal.

In the mistakes made in trying to combat this awful pandemic, that would not even register. Indeed, never mind demonising a celebratory hug, it is time some people got a grip.