Premier League The Return

Eight-page guide to a five-week festival of football

Ever since coronavirus struck, the only certainty has been uncertainty. How long would it last? What would it all mean? What would the toll be in terms of lives; livelihoods? What would be the mental and emotional damage? What does the “new normal” mean?

For a while we were learning new phrases and new ways – social distancing, flattening the curve, furloughing, the R number – and those extended to sport and to football, where there was talk of calling off the season, of declaring it null and void, with the word “curtailment” suddenly becoming part of the game’s lexicon.

Now, 100 days later, with Aston Villa facing Sheffield United and Manchester City at home to Arsenal, the Premier League is back. And, as with life, there is uncertainty all around. Even uncertainty over what kind of football it will be.

The only certainty is that Liverpool, with their 25-point advantage, will win a maiden Premier League title, and their first league crown since 1990. And they will do so – it appears increasingly likely, and unless there is a sudden second wave of Covid-19 – without an asterisk by their name, which would have been cruel on the worthiest of champions, even if they cannot celebrate as exuberantly as they deserve.

The glee with which some football supporters goaded Liverpool in the dark days of March, with the hope that the season would be abandoned and their title denied, was unedifying. Whatever tribal rivalries exist, sometimes you have to be bigger than that, which has to be one of the lessons from this pandemic.

As one Premier League executive put it at the time of the shutdown, the least of everyone’s worries should be whether Liverpool are champions.

Being on the right side of history has been another phrase that has been often used. It resonates with the Black Lives Matter movement and, for example, the remarkable work undertaken by Marcus Rashford to provide meals for those so desperately in need of them and who have been left even more disfranchised.

But while football and footballers have done so much good, the crisis has also, at times, exposed the vested interests and lack of trust between clubs and players and organisations.

Meanwhile, we have all spent so much time examining the details of Project Restart, “return to training/playing” protocols, biosecure training grounds, working out what red, amber and green zones are and following the success of the testing regime, that the actual football has almost crept up on us.

As a football writer, it has actually been difficult to switch from one mode to the other, but the relief of referee Michael Oliver blowing his whistle to begin again at 6pm at Villa Park will be overpowering.

Then what? We know the landscape of football will be very different and not least the environment inside the stadiums, empty but for 300 or so people, and we know the restrictions on what the players will be able to do.

But beyond that, what do we know? Bayern Munich have picked up where they left off in the Bundesliga, but in the Premier League there are so many possibilities and chief among those is the bare fact that this could effectively be a new, unprecedented mini-season.

Four clubs have 10 league games left, the rest have nine. It is a quarter of a season but a quarter that sits in isolation – to use another key coronavirus word – with a frenzy of 92 games in just 39 days and with the FA Cup shoehorned in. It will be a mini-tournament in itself with no margin for error. It will be a test of organisation and coaching and we will quickly see which clubs and managers have had a “good” lockdown with their preparations.

Given the gap between the 201819 season ending and this season beginning was just 87 days, 13 fewer than we have lost to lockdown, will previous form count? Will the fact that Manchester United swept aside Manchester City in the 287th and penultimate game before lockdown mean anything? Or will the return of Paul Pogba and Rashford, who would not have been available for the rest of the season through injury, matter more?

They are not the only two bigname absentees who are returning and, in theory, it should be Tottenham Hotspur who benefit most, with Jose Mourinho’s side running on empty and running out of players but now able to turn to Harry Kane and Son Heung-min again.

The fight for those European places should be fascinating, for while there is excitement around Chelsea with the impending signing of Timo Werner, the Germany international has not arrived yet and Frank Lampard will know that, like everyone else, his team will have to hit the ground running if they are to hold on to fourth place and stave off the challengers gathering below them.

That pack includes United, Tottenham and Arsenal but also – wonderfully – Sheffield United and Wolverhampton Wanderers, who are among the fittest and bestprepared teams in the division, even if the fear is that the bigger clubs with their bigger squads (and now being allowed to make two added substitutions) might edge them out.

The heat is on and the heat may also be a factor, with the games being played in these summer months, while an intriguing thought is how some players might thrive, and others might struggle, without fans being there.

Psychologically, as has been evidenced by players such as Bayern’s Joshua Kimmich in interviews, it is very different, while home advantage – such a hot topic in England when neutral venues were discussed – has largely gone out of the window.

It will be the relegation battle, though, that is the most fascinating, because it carries such a huge degree of jeopardy and not least because whoever is demoted will be dropping down into a Championship that might be very different, with an impending salary cap and its financial woes.

Logically there are six teams in the fight, but we can probably go as high as Newcastle United – with the uncertainty surrounding the club’s future – in 13th, as now being part of that anxious cohort.

For all the talk of sporting integrity, everyone knows that finishing the season was largely an economic equation aimed at heading off a calculated £1billion financial implosion and, as an industry, football had every right to fight for its survival.

Even so, the concern is the wellintended talk of a “reset” and the sport behaving more responsibly will now quickly disappear, given the big show is back on. But that does not mean we cannot be pleased at its return.

It is a quarter of a season but a quarter that sits in isolation, with a frenzy of 92 games in just 39 days