Sunday 15 March 2020

How easy will it be to restart the league in early April?

With Bournemouth's players not set to come back to training until 23 March, they'll have some 10 days to try and keep their fitness levels up with their personal training schedules that they have been sent home with. COVID-19 is not suddenly going to let up though and even training in groups could be something that is not advised come late March.
It may be a long time before we see this many people around Dean Court.
We are in unprecedented times. The cancellation of football has a lot of knock on problems for those who work for the game and suddenly will have a lack of income. It's not the players in the Premier League that will suffer, but the lower leagues and the men and women that do the jobs around games that will really feel the financial impact.

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But for the players that Bournemouth have, it is going to be mentally challenging to keep focussed and dedicated with all the news that is swirling about on whether the season should continue or not. Even when they may be ready to come back other teams might not be in the same position with a number of players not yet fit to play.

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If the players do keep their fitness levels going and do come back and are ready to play at the start of April, it will be a remarkable effort. This won't seem like a normal international break. There are things going on that have already affected the club with five employees in self-isolation, and who knows if more relatives will catch this pandemic in the days and weeks to come. I don't think this is a switch that the Premier League can just turn on and off. As time goes by there will be more and more pressure for clarity of how things can restart and more and more questions coming from clubs that are not feeling ready to resume.
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We could be in a very different situation come the end of March if matters get worse as expected. Getting to games could be just as hard as trying to catch a flight to certain destinations. This could be an extended holiday period for football and we might not see anther game until late summer or even the autumn.

It will be a big day next Thursday when UEFA has to decide what happens with the European Championship, which is likely to be postponed until next year. Then they may well start trying to sort out what happens with the Champions League and Europa League. I'd imagine the Premier League and other European League would have to follow the lead of what will happen with these major fixtures and whether this does free up time to complete the domestic leagues, or whether COVID-19 makes trying to complete the fixture list an impossibility.


The Premier League may have to make a definitive call on 3 April, because the players can't just be training for a date wen they may or may not have a game to play.

Previous post on Cherry Chimes - Could the season be abandoned and save AFCB's blushes

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