SPORT MUST KNOW ITS PLACE IN A CRISIS:
LEaVE the truly serious stuff to the grown-ups. Please. Let the smartest people in the room do their work without distraction.
The folk running the world’s games departments? Their contribution should be restricted to finding a way to work around, rather than against, the decisions being made by those with genuine expertise.
If that means postponing the Euro 2020 finals for an entire year, one of the more radical proposals floated yesterday, so be it.
For sporting bodies under siege by a public health crisis proving impossible to pin down, there is no option but to accept hard facts. Or so you might imagine.
Incredibly, UEFa have flat-out denied any suggestion that they might reschedule their flagship tournament — due to kick off at rome’s stadio Olimpico in 13 weeks’ time — on the grounds of public safety.
according to associated Press reports last night, in fact, football administrators in Nyon have actually been putting pressure on governments to ensure that the tournament goes ahead exactly as planned. across all 12 host cities, covering an area containing just about every coronavirus hotspot on the Continent.
apparently, as long as a country has the infrastructure to treat supporters when they succumb to COVId-19, there’s no need to change a thing.
astonishing. reckless. and a position that surely won’t survive another week of fast-changing events. Because curtailment and/ or delaying of the Euros now seems not only advisable but almost inevitable.
so, too, does the prospect of some club competitions — possibly up to and including the Championship League — being temporarily suspended, leading to a massive cut-and-paste job on fixture calendars across Europe.
The most extreme precautions should, if backed up with hard scientific evidence, be accepted without complaint.
some will still complain about how unfair it all is. But a majority will understand the need to defer to the specialists. sport in general, with football at the forefront will have to find a way to cope.
as Sportsmail recently revealed, the initial sPFL doomsday scenario involved simply cutting season 2019-20 short. and letting clubs stand or fall where they finish on termination day.
Never mind sporting integrity. The season must finish when the season must finish.
But think about this logically. The only reason domestic and European club competitions were being pushed to conclude on a certain date was because UEFa couldn’t have anything disrupting the start of Euro 2020. Move the European Championships back by a year or even a month, however, and the conflict disappears.
That apparently makes too much sense for some, not least UEFa president aleksander Ceferin, who cheerfully declared just last week: ‘Let’s not think about dark scenarios.’ sorry, Mr Ceferin. But those dark scenarios are already upon us.
Virtually every major domestic league in Europe, along with a few UEFa competitions, will be playing games behind closed doors for a while yet. rangers will experience that for themselves in Leverkusen next week.
Wolves wanted to postpone their Europa League game against Olympiacos after the Greek club’s owner — who also owns Nottingham Forest — tested positive for the virus.
Italy is effectively under collective house arrest, with the thrilling battle for the serie a title all but forgotten amid the crisis. australia’s FIFa World Cup qualifiers scheduled for the next two international breaks — this month and June — have been postponed. The six Nations doesn’t even have an end date as yet.
so let’s suggest that a football tournament stretching from Baku to Glasgow, st Petersburg to dublin, doesn’t go ahead as planned. Fortunately, there is nothing in the rules that says that the European Championships have to kick off on June 12, 2020. Or that it has to include all 12 host cities.
There’s a certain elegance to the idea of pushing it back a whole year, taking advantage of the fact that there’s always this fallow summer between major tournaments for UEFa nations.
It would allow domestic and European club competitions to take a break, if needed, and resume the season once the worst of the virus has hopefully passed.
There’s no reason why the sPFL couldn’t, if required, stop games in april and play out the post-split fixtures in June, is there?
If you think the football calendar is sacrosanct, incidentally, remember that we’re going to punch a giant hole in season 2022-23 so a winter World Cup can be played in the desert. Is Qatari money really a more persuasive force than the threat of a global pandemic? No, don’t answer that.
When the UK government gathered sporting bodies together to discuss contingency planning earlier this week, it was reported that a number of those present made the economic case for keeping calm and carrying on.
It’s a fair point. Even if clubs followed the innovative Levski sofia approach by offering fans ‘virtual tickets’ for closed-doors games, guaranteeing some income from generous supporters, the financial hit would be huge.
Imagine an outbreak being traced back to your stadium. Consider the impact on ‘brand loyalty’ if supporters, their parents or grandparents fall seriously ill — and it’s later shown that your club could have done more to prevent the spread.
as for governments of every hue, it’s easy to see why they want the biggest sports to keep packing them in. In the eyes of politicians, anything that takes people’s minds off the toilet roll wars is to be encouraged, not banned.
at some point, however, they’ll have to follow doctor’s orders. sport had better be ready to adapt. and understand there are worse things in this world than a disrupted league campaign or a postponed international tournament.