Common sense at last
EXCLUSIVE
All games went ahead this weekend as normal but with protocols in place. New Zealand team Wellington Phoenix are relocating to Oz for the season.
THIRTEEN HOURS on Friday the 13th.
That’s how long it took for the Premier League and the rest of the British football to finally go into total lockdown. Inevitable, perhaps, but the pace at which the coronavirus outbreak swept the world, and stopped our beloved national game in its tracks last week, is still pretty extraordinary.
At 9.30pm on Thursday, the Premier League was maintaining the stance that the weekend fixtures would go ahead.
At 10.30am the following day they announced the 2019-20 season was on hold until April 3 – at the earliest.
Of course, it was the only logical step – given the dramatic rate top-fl■igbhytScTluAbRs cases of players and staff testing positive for the potentially lethal Covid-19 disease.
And, in turn, that automatically ended the prospect of completing the final few weeks of the season behind closed doors.
Nobody anywhere in football wanted such a cold, empty solution to such a ghastly, unprecedented global crisis, as Tottenham’s French defender Serge Aurier (left) had underlined prior to their clash against Manchester United being called off. The former Paris Saint-Germain full-back said: “Everyone wants to play with fans. We play football for those moments.
“It’s not good when you go to the stadium and don’t have the support of the fans.
“And I think we must protect everyone because this virus is very dangerous. We need to follow this bad moment and we need to adapt.”
Not long after Aurier spoke to the media, the Premier League insisted they were hitting the pause button after advice from the government and its medical experts regarding large gatherings posing no immediate risk.
Forget that Italy, Spain and France had already