Sunday Mirror (Northern Ireland)
It WILL be farcical – but won’t football be great!
WHOEVER you are, never start a campaign you cannot win.
That stands whether you’re a politician, newspaper editor, humanrights activist, footballer, whoever.
Someone should have told that to Dave Kitson.
There is no doubt Kitson (below, top picture) put a lot of work into proposals that said he was “ready, willing and able” to lead the PFA.
And there is no doubt that the man he vilifies – PFA chief executive Gordon Taylor (right), who is due to stand down when an independent review is concluded – is not everyone’s idea of the perfect union leader. Certainly not at £2.2million a year. But how on earth did Kitson think his ideas would gain traction when comments he made after Raheem Sterling was the victim of abuse at Chelsea – talking about ‘players making themselves targets’ – were still only 17 months old?
Sounds like a long time, but it’s fresh in football terms. As if they were not going to be Exhibit A in the case against Kitson taking over at the PFA?
Still, at least Kitson will learn something from this ill-fated coup.
NEVER start a campaign you cannot win.
IF Premier League clubs really are insistent on completing this season, then – with the Government’s approval – they had better get a behind-closed-doors plan working pretty damn quickly.
Because there is a simple truth out there. If you don’t play behind closed doors, you will have to wait for gatherings in their thousands to be permitted and that might be 18 months away.
Anyone for finishing the 2019/20 season in the winter of 2021?
Thought not.
WHEN the Lockdown League® is under way next month, Geoff Shreeves can toss the Man of the Match award to its recipient from a couple of metres.
There will be a second accolade after each match, of course – the Social Distancer of the Game, the player who has best avoided physical contact and resisted close-quarters engagement with the opposition.
Mesut Ozil had better clear his mantelpiece.
And then the pair of award-winners, themselves separated by a cardboard cut-out of a reclining Peter Crouch, will send muffled words through face coverings provided by an official mask supplier to the world’s finest domestic sporting competition.
The PL’s PPE partners.
“That’s a massive win, especially after going down to 10 men. But no complaints about the red card – you can’t spit on the grass and expect to get away it. Not at this level.”
Quite. VAR thought it had spotted
JURGEN KLOPP took part in a video call a few days ago to his old charges from his days at Borussia Dortmund.
He laughed, reminisced and got a bit emotional, like we all do in lockdown.
Klopp (right) joked and chatted with countrymen Mats Hummels and Mario Gotze about someone else gobbing off the ball, but they couldn’t be sure it wasn’t an accidental dribble. Fine lines and all that.
Pick that apart in the studio, where the marking at set-pieces is being forensically dissected by the pundits in four corners of the stadium.
“You’ve got to be a lot, lot further away from him than that. He actually goes with his man, tracks him, no more than a few inches away from him. Schoolboy stuff. Amateur hour. Unforgivable.”
As for the winning goal.
“Look at all that space he has been given. No one around him, no one trying to close him down… fantastic! That’s EXACTLY what we want to see.”
And those celebrations? Cupping the ear so someone can come along and put a thermometer in it? Brilliant. the team’s Bundesliga title coronation on April 30, 2011.
If you are in lockdown, you are in lockdown. It probably does not matter that much where you are.
But it is clearly a time when your emotions are heightened and, if you are away from home, the sense of absence is made keener. I just wonder whether
Waving your team-mates away to form an orderly queue for the hand sanitiser? Tremendous.
Now, it’s all about defending your advantage. Getting antibodies behind the ball. Sterile football? Maybe. But that’s what the Lockdown League® will be all about.
Almost two months of football deprivation has made a mark, and my dilemma is surely most football fans’ dilemma. No, I don’t think professional football should be allowed any time soon, but – and I won’t admit it – won’t complain when it is. If players are prepared to expose themselves and their families to a very slightly increased risk then so be it.
If the Government and its medical advisers allows a bio-secure freak show to go ahead, fair enough. Watching Kevin De Bruyne whisper one of the psychological ramifications of this unprecedented time will be for foreign players or managers to re-evaluate how long they want to spend away from their homeland?
Just thinking... as you do in lockdown. to the football, watching Virgil van Dijk strut like some defensive god, watching Marcus Rashford sprint like the wind, watching Billy Gilmour redefine precocity, watching the topclass players in our game will be some sort of succour for the soul.
While I might not agree with it and want to be seen as not agreeing with it, at least the Lockdown League® would be a distraction from the days when the only classified results arrive courtesy of the Covid-19 death tolls.
But do not let anyone tell you that if football does actually restart, this is the Premier League being completed.
It is not. The Premier League season, in the manner in which it started, is finished. Destroyed. Without a winner, without losers. A resumption in June will not be a resumption. It will be the start of the made-for-TV Lockdown League®.
But after so long without seeing a ball kicked, there are probably many of us – secretly, guiltily, against our consciences – who cannot wait.