Sandgrounders put under pressure to play – despite players testing positive

SOUTHPORT director Ian Kyle has lifted the lid on the pressure the club was put under to fulfil recent fixtures against Flyde and Darlington – despite genuine Covid concerns and positive cases among the squad.

The National League North and South has been suspended for two weeks with many clubs arguing they cannot continue without financial support.

Clubs say they were promised grants at the start of the season but have since been told funds would only be made available via loans, a situation many feel unviable.

And while the Sandgrounders shared those concerns, the biggest motivating factor in calling a halt to the fixture programme was the continued health and safety of all those connected to the club and the potential impact on family and colleagues.

Speaking ahead of the decision and last week’s FA Trophy win at Halifax, Mr Kyle said: “Financials aside, it’s something of a disgrace when our priority is that all of our players and staff are fit and healthy at a time when you only have to switch on the news to see we’re looking at 1,200 people a day dying – and we’re expected to put 25 people onto a coach to say, Gloucester, a seven-hour round trip?

“I think it’s a very difficult situation for us because the players at the moment are all fit and healthy and you would hope that, should they contract coronavirus, that they’re fit and healthy enough to deal with it. But what about the families they go home to? What about the staff in the work places they have to go to?

“I keep asking myself ‘why?’ The whole point of non-league football is the fans. They come to non-league football for the experience, the day out – there’s nobody here to enjoy that at the moment, there’s no atmosphere, so day out with a pie and a pint. So why are we taking these risks?

“Financials aside, that’s the first concern that we have.

“If you look across the Premier League, the Championship and the EFL, they are testing their players two of three times a week, they have really stringent guidelines as to who can and can’t be involved. Every time our players get together, they are taking a risk.

“We’re taking a risk with the players, their families, volunteers on a matchday.

“You keep coming back to the daily rates of how many people are contracting this virus and it’s serious enough that most children are not going to school. So why are we putting our staff at risk?

“For ourselves as directors it was brought home to us with the game against Fylde and Darlington games.

“With regards to the Flyde game, obviously the game on December 28th was called off by ourselves because we had a couple of players who were showing symptoms. We followed all the correct procedures, all the guidelines, and notified the league and suggested we put the game back by at least a week so we could get those players tested and make sure they weren’t spreading it around, as it were.

“We were put under great pressure to get that game on within 48 hours, to the point where we were putting pressure on the players to continually ring 119 and chase up their results because the National League were demanding answers from us, up to the point where people even at 1 o’clock on the Wednesday were asking ‘are we playing? Why aren’t we playing? We should be playing!’

“That was 48 hours after we’d notified the league we had players showing symptoms. Flyde even filed a formal complaint because we weren’t turning up 48 hours later.

Ian Kyle

“So again, you get that imbalance between what’s going on in the world and the National League doing their damndest to get this game on.

“In an ideal world we’d be testing every player. We haven’t got that capacity and the

National League know that.”

The situation was similar when ’Port were set to face Darlington – and this time they were talking about confirmed cases of Covid.

“Against Darlington, we actually had a couple of positive cases and there was still this examination of us!” said Mr Kyle. “‘Well, who have they actually come into contact with? Because if they haven’t come into contact with all the players, let’s still get this game on’. These are players who train together, share dressing rooms together.

“If it wasn’t for the common sense intervention of our club doctor, we’d have probably been forced to play both of those games.

“Our plan is quite simple – we want to keep as many players, staff and volunteers as possible fit and healthy.

“It keeps bringing me back to the question of why we are doing this?”

We were put under great pressure to get that game (against Fylde) played