We’ll watch from the car boot, DCMS

THANK you for your latest guidance issued less than a week before grassroots football returned in a safe environment.

Grassroots football is run by those all-too-few volunteers all committed to the same thing – the safe return of football.

Therefore, the guidance must be clear, consistent, and easily understood by these volunteers, so thank you so much for having these people in the forefront of your minds. After all, they are the ones who need to make your contradictory, last-minute guidance actually work.

Both your department and the Football Association confirmed that spectators would be returning to grassroots football – subject to the rule of six, social distancing etc – from April 12.

But never mind, we’re all grateful for the five days notice, and at least the time you’ve kept club officials at home reviewing policies and risk assessments, and fixtures secretaries scheduling games, wasn’t squandered in vain, as it kept them busy, indoors, and SAFE. We’d rather you left the moving of goalposts to our wonderful grassroots groundsmen, but to be fair you do seem to have a flair for it.

We were pleased to learn that matches can now take place on public grounds, but not on those dangerous private grounds where clubs can safely manage social distancing around a 300-yard perimeter.

We were also pleased to learn that Covid-19 can distinguish between “public”(safe) and “private” (not safe) land. We knew it was an “intelligent virus”, but your understanding of it has made things so much easier for us. It’s all about “following the science” after all.

Don’t listen to the moans of those leagues that say you don’t know what you’re doing. It’s clearly a danger, so we will NOT be watching a match in these deathtraps, but instead will be visiting the car boot sale in the field next door along with another 3,999 folk, or spending the afternoon crammed indoors at a newly-reopened shopping centre rather than outside in the fresh air as part of a “crowd” of 30. We hope these leagues and clubs appreciate what a bullet you’ve helped them dodge.