Even football’s most grounded boss is losing sight of reality
THE Premier League bubble really must be impenetrably opaque for someone inside it to think footballers should receive the coronavirus vaccine ahead of pensioners. For Sean Dyche to be the one to come out with this queue-jumping claptrap is as surprising as it is dispiriting. If there was one millionaire manager you would have imagined would have maintained a hotline to the real world, it would have been the Burnley manager.
Loves his curries, big fan of jet washing, calls out namby-pamby divers, plays tough football at a proper, down-to-earth club – he should be the ordinary man and woman’s delegate at the high table of the English game.
Instead, he has exposed himself as hopelessly out of touch.
Read the ravaged room. It is full of frightened, weary, lonely people whose world has been closed for too long. To contemplate making a single one of them wait longer for their pass out of this nightmare in order to help football is badly misguided.
For Premier League players in their 20s, the virus is generally nothing worse than an inconvenience; for some of those who might be pushed back by such a reordering, it is a potential killer.
The Burnley manager feels vaccination will even out the Premier League playing field by removing the lottery of Covid-related withdrawals. As if that is remotely important in the big picture of what is happening at the moment.
The vaccination programme is intended to save lives, not save football clubs from relegation.
If Dyche truly believes in this course of action – and he described it as common sense – he needs to sit down and reflect on his priorities.
He made clear that he would want those that are very vulnerable in society to be vaccinated first but where is that line to be drawn?
Virtually everyone is more vulnerable to the virus than the healthy athletes who populate the Premier League.
Even if Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s optimistic vaccination rollout plan runs to schedule, the NHS will still be injecting those aged 70 and over with their first dose in mid-february. They will be having their second jab as the season ends.
By Dyche’s calculations, there would be 100 people at each Premier League club who would need vaccinating. That equates to 4,000 injections that would need to be delayed for more needy people.
In no sense is that trade-off justifiable to deliver a fair outcome to the season.
A football season is never fair anyway. The myth that bad luck, ropey decisions and injuries even out over the course of 38 games is exactly that. A myth.
Some clubs will end up with the rough end of the stick this year as they always do.
It might be Burnley, it might not – but that’s sport. Every club makes the best of the hand they are dealt.
Dyche points out that money could be saved and redirected to the NHS by giving the vaccine for football and thereby removing the need for twice-weekly testing at
Premier League clubs. It would be good if it happened, of course, but would the Premier League, who love a few quid, really do that? They would probably loan the NHS the money and ask for it back.
In any case, it is not cost that is the issue but the supply and delivery of the vaccine.
How exactly would the public at large feel about the likes of festive revellers Erik
Lamela, Giovani Lo
Celso, Sergio Reguilon,
Luka Milivojevic and
Benjamin Mendy being promoted in front of them in the queue? Mightily aggrieved, probably. It would certainly be a curious form of punishment after their
Yuletide rule-breaking.
If there are to be exceptions to the programme based on occupations, footballers should be at the bottom of the list – not for the transgressions of a few but simply because they are medically better equipped to cope with coronavirus.
If you asked them most players, despite the profession’s damaged reputation, would agree. They would blanche at the idea that they should be pushed ahead of teachers or social workers – or anyone in greater need.
The rope out of this abyss is a long one. Football will just have to be patient and accept its place at the back of the queue, rather than think up grubby ways to leapfrog it. Money cannot buy everything.