Cancel the Christmas fixtures NOW for the sake of public health and the league. Huge football crowds turn matches into Omicron super-spreader events STAN COLLYMORE

I AM a massive fan of the way they do things at Brentford – from the owner, Matthew Benham, down.

So I wasn’t surprised to hear head coach Thomas Frank come out on Thursday and call for all of this weekend’s games to be postponed in a bid to save the Christmas fixtures from Covid.

He didn’t pussyfoot around. He called it how he saw it. And I completely agreed with what he said – that there’ll be a price to pay in a week or two for the fact games were going ahead this weekend, a price that really isn’t worth paying.

I’d actually have gone further than Frank and postponed the whole Christmas programme.

I would have shut things down from

Thursday, when Manchester United’s clash with Brighton, scheduled for yesterday, became the fourth game of the week to bite the dust.

And I wouldn’t have restarted them until January 1, just to give the game a complete circuit-break to try to slow down what is a fast-moving situation.

Infectious

My big fear is that football, with its huge crowds, will be a super-spreader of Omicron, an incredibly infectious virus variant which clearly isn’t going away anytime soon.

But instead of making the big call, we’re carrying on regardless, with football seemingly not knowing at the minute quite what to do for the best.

The big question the sport has to ask is, ‘What’s the endgame here?’

And the answer has to be that it cannot afford another shutdown like we had in 2020. So it needs to have a sane and sensible conversation, and that would hopefully see the introduction of a ‘cordon sanitaire’ which at least would mean football had done its bit to respond to what is happening.

That means passes. I’ve already heard from more than one friend who went to a game on Wednesday and was not asked to show a Covid pass. So already we can see how much of an impact that could still have.

And when I see players at big Premier League clubs testing positive at such an alarming rate, it makes me wonder what’s happening further down the pyramid where tests are not quite so readily available.

If you’re a club such as Southend United or a Scunthorpe, then in times like these you’re looking for leadership from further up. So I just can’t see why we wouldn’t have a pause for the sake of public health and for the sake of the league being able to continue.

We’ve already heard the UK’S Chief Medical Officer Professor Chris Whitty saying, ‘If you don’t have to mix, then don’t’, and perhaps football ought to be the industry that leads – because others will certainly follow.

Mixing

The late postponement of Villa’s clash with Burnley yesterday would have meant many fans had already left home when they didn’t have to.

Of less importance, there’s also an argument for a mass stop in terms of the integrity of the competition.

Because I’m looking at the table and seeing a wide variety of different totals in the ‘played’ column, and that cannot

be right. It’s a tough decision and the fact I’m talking about cancelling Boxing Day football is incredible to me. I loved the old tales of playing on Christmas Day and Boxing Day.

I played on two consecutive days – December 27 and 28, 1993 – for Nottingham Forest against Middlesbrough at home and Bristol City away, I scored in both and loved the experience.

I also love the idea of Christmas football being all about families going together and the festive atmosphere you get. But in spite of all that, the best thing for us all this year would be to cancel it.

I don’t like it and I don’t want it. But neither do I want to hear someone has died because football stadiums were packed three or four times in the space of 12 days just because of the tradition.