Sunday Supplement: Voiding the season would be surrender, says Henry Winter
Written by News on 27/04/2020
Henry Winter says voiding the current campaign in England “would be a surrender” as the Sunday Supplement panel debated the future of the season.
The Sky Sports show returned at the weekend with chief football writer at The Times, Winter, chief sports writer at the Daily Mail, Martin Samuel, and the Mirror‘s chief football writer, John Cross, joining Geoff Shreeves for the new edition.
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The topic on everyone’s mind is when football could resume and the complexities surrounding it, with Winter adamant that the season should be completed when safe to do so.
Read on for the Sunday Supplement panellists’ thoughts…
Could there be a point where football doesn’t pick up where it left off?
Winter: “It is really important that football completes the season. It’s not a Liverpool thing, it’s not a Leeds thing, it’s not simply about the teams who have fought hard to get into the Champions League positions, it’s about the general sporting principle that you finish what you started.
“This is an unbelievable situation that this country and the world is in, but what a moment it’s going to be when football can finally get going again and fans can walk back into the stadium and go ‘right, where were we?’ and you fight on. You can’t surrender to adversity, even one as big as this.
“I agree with Oliver Holt [in the Mail on Sunday] and his conclusion is if it comes down to points per game [PPG] and that’s the way it’s decided then fair enough. It will still be a huge asterisk against the season but you can’t void a season. I’m slightly disappointed with the path the Dutch have gone down and there will be a lot of eyes watching the Bundesliga but you cannot rush back. It is as simple as that.
“However, voiding the season would be a surrender, and I don’t want to face that yet.
“This is not simply a Premier League issue. We have to consider the sanctity of the pyramid. We lost Bury this season but we have to keep clubs safe, and preserve the pathway for players and coaches to progress. Football at the elite end must understand its place at the top of the pyramid and support and protect those below, financially.”
When could football resume?
Samuel: “You can’t base something on what you don’t know. There’s no date for football’s return, there’s no date for the new season, there’s no date for international fixtures. When the PGA talked about coming back, they talked about needing around one million tests to get three or four golf tournaments on. It is the sort of scale you would be looking at if football was going to exist in a little bubble outside the rest of society, where it can carry on as usual without the crowds.
“It really is unrealistic at the moment to talk about any sort of when or how it can return because you really do not know what it will be like. You don’t know what travel plans will be like, because it’s not just the grounds as such, it’s the travelling to the grounds, it’s mass transportation. Football uses trains, coaches, everything and the idea that you’re going to get people on them would be unthinkable at the moment and we don’t know when it will be achieved again.
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“Good luck to the Bundesliga for trying but they’ve got a different situation in Germany because they have got massive testing centres. They’ve got more testing centres in Germany to begin with and pharmaceutical centres are the biggest in Europe. They were better set up for this than we were to begin with and it’s not a surprise they think they can get back the earliest, but it would be very dangerous to think we’re at the same level as Germany because we’re not.
“You are going to get the odd chairman, club, owner, league who thinks the way to handle an unprecedented situation that nobody could have prepared for in a sporting context [is through litigation]. What needs to be in the mix is the [threat of] legal action dragging on however many years. What everyone is trying to do is find the best way forward. None of it is ideal.”
Winter: “No one knows, the only people who really know are the Government scientists. The Premier League have a very good medical advisor in Dr Mark Gillett and the clubs are talking all the time, which is vital.
“I can understand why they want to plan ahead. There’s broadcast money and legal issues, they have to plan and look after staff, but really, this decision can only be taken by people who are on the frontline against the pandemic, the work of the amazing NHS and also the scientists who need to decide when it will be safe. Football is important, we’re all missing it, players and managers are desperate to get back, but really, the most important thing is the health of this country.
“Football has always lived in a bubble but it has had to break out of that bubble now and realise there is a real world out there and there are people on the frontline and people dying. Football has got to appreciate its place in the modern world, in this modern situation, this pandemic we’re in, and not rush back. It would be horrific if, with people dying and the NHS not having all the PPE they need, that tests would go to footballers and people going to grounds, that would be completely wrong.
“Football needs to plan but there needs to be a little bit more perspective that there are bigger issues at play here. We’re all missing football, but it cannot be rushed back.”
Cross: “It’s very interesting to read Jonathan Northcroft’s piece in The Sunday Times, for example, simply because if you analyse that, he’s talking about a return to training in June. That is immediately pushing back on what we previously thought when the Premier League was talking about a return to training on May 18 and on June 8, return to football with games behind closed doors and then hopefully finishing in mid-July.
“That seems remarkably optimistic, almost reckless to me, because we’ve also got to think about the health and safety of the players. They are clearly desperate to play again, of course they are, but we have to keep them safe and their families safe and for me, that continually gets overlooked – the health and welfare of players and their families.
“Also, the extra demands on the already overstretched emergency services. Can you imagine telling the emergency services ‘sorry, you can’t go to the hospital today because you’ve got to man the fort at a Premier League ground to test and steward all these people coming in’.
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“Reading Holt’s piece, I agree that we, of course, want to complete the season, but I think we are trying to be forced and rushed into something. UEFA have laid down this desire to play the Champions League final on August 29 as some sort of end point. To me, that seems incredibly optimistic when we’re seeing social distancing in some form for the rest of the year.
“We need to step back. In the last Premier League meeting, the Government stressed that football is not a special case and it’s not viewed as such. We all think of football as our love, that it is a special case and we’re desperate for it to return, but the reality is we’ve just got to be careful and think of society first. It’s unprecedented times, it’s a unique situation and metaphorically speaking, we’ve got to put out foot on the ball and be sensible.”
What about playing behind closed doors?
Winter: “I think one thing to come out of this is when football returns, fans will be appreciated more by the clubs and by the Premier League itself because if the 92 or so games that are still to be played in the Premier League are to be played without fans and behind closed doors, and that is sadly inevitable, then we have to appreciate properly, and football has to acknowledge this properly when it returns, how important fans are.
“They are so vital and when football does return, the importance of fans in terms of the atmosphere and lifeblood of the game is properly appreciated, but at the moment, I can’t see fans going back in to grounds.”
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Cross: “Even behind closed doors, you’re going to have huge numbers. One Premier League club told me last week you would need a bare minimum of 256 people to play a behind-closed-doors game at their ground. That’s players, staff, media, that’s everyone and it’s a lot of people.
“You’re then also talking about the worry of fans still turning up en masse because they want to come and support their team. They’re desperate to get football back so you’d arguably need more stewarding and policing for that. At the moment, we just have to be so careful on this.”
Samuel: “What constitutes a team? You can say we’ll play safely behind closed doors, we’ll test, but then if one guy tests positive, your team’s in quarantine. Could you get a situation where, say, Watford, are relegated and they’ve had to play the last five matches with the U17 team because everyone else is in quarantine? It’s a really big situation if we were to go back behind closed doors – is it the existing 25-man squad or is it anyone you could field? You could get some mightily unfair mismatches.”
Would points per game be unfair?
Samuel: “How could you decide a promotion in League One using PPG because it’s so close? How could you say, ‘You can’t come up because you’re 0.3 points behind somebody else?’ I’m not sure you could make PPG work with relegation and certainly some of the promotion issues in the EFL are far tighter.
“There’s so much money at stake from being in the Premier League and the Championship. That’s why we’re hearing a lot more about curtailment rather than we start again when we can start again. It’s the relegation issue that is key.”
Winter: “What happens if Liverpool get the points they need for the title and Jurgen Klopp, as he’s entitled to do so, says he’s going to focus on next season and rest some of his stars? I understand it may well come down to PPG as nobody wants the season voiding but that doesn’t take into account previous form – look at the impact Nigel Pearson’s had at Watford and Norwich have a belief that they’re not out of it yet.
“You have to look at the opposition they’re facing. There are many issues but the central point is that football cannot rush back with the mortality rate as it is.”
(c) Sky Sports 2020: Sunday Supplement: Voiding the season would be surrender, says Henry Winter
