Two City games fall to Covid and already it’s fixture headache
NEAR-IMPOSSIBLE FIXTURE
LEICESTER City may not be able to play their two postponed matches from the past few days until the final month of the season, with limited opportunities to squeeze them into the schedule.
After a rise in the number of positive Covid cases in City’s squad, the Premier League agreed to call off Thursday night’s game against Tottenham at the King Power Stadium, as well as yesterday’s trip to Everton.
They are far from the only club affected, with more than half of the games postponed over the weekend.
With rising Covid cases over the festive period, the likelihood of City seeing another game called off appears to be considerable, never mind games being called off for other reassons, such as snow and ice.
The next job for the Premier League is to find dates on which to rearrange the fixtures and, despite there being five months left in the campaign, it is already trickier than it sounds.
Starting from the week beginning January 3, there are 20 weeks until the scheduled final round of Premier League fixtures on May 22.
However, 16 of those 20 weeks are potentially off limits for City in terms of fixtures being played in midweek.
Some of those weeks are already taken up by scheduled Premier League games, by the division’s winter break (which runs for a fortnight from January 24), or by international fixtures.
If City progress in the Carabao Cup, the FA Cup or the Europa
Conference League, more midweeks are filled, leaving just four.
One of the four is next month, in the week commencing January 17.
However, this will be in the middle of the Africa Cup of Nations, and clubs may oppose matches being played then, given they would have had their leading African stars available if the games had been played this week.
For City, they will miss Wilfred Ndidi, Kelechi Iheanacho, Daniel Amartey and Papy Mendy for around a month.
The other three free midweeks for City do not come until later in the season, in the weeks commencing April 18, May 9 and May 16.
There are a few issues that could arise before then. If City reach the Carabao Cup final, they will have to move a Premier League game into a midweek slot, and it’s the same if they reach the FA Cup quarter-final, or the semi-final and final beyond that.
They would not have any free weeks to play all of those games in the event they also made it to the semi-finals of the Europa Conference League.
The other problem is that it is not ever about one club.
One of City’s games that needs rescheduling is against Tottenham, who have had two other Premier League matches called off so far – one for snow against Burnley and one for Covid against Brighton – along with a European game against Rennes.
With the next campaign starting earlier to accommodate a mid-season break for the World Cup in Qatar, the Premier League will not want to push this term into the summer months, as happened last year when Covid saw the season 2019/2020 suspended for a couple of months.