WE ALL need a good laugh right now and so I’d recommend you all Google ‘David Mitchell football’.
There, you will find the magnificent sketch from “That Mitchell and Webb Look” in which the comedian thunders around Loftus Road performing a spoof Sky TV football trailer in an increasingly loud and manic tone.
In his magnificent ‘That Mitchell and Webb Look’ sketch (below), David Mitchell highlights the uncomfortable truth of just how much football we consumeCredit: BBC
Towards the end, he bellows: “Thousands of hours of football, each more climactic than the last, constant, dizzying, 24-hour, year-long, football, every kick of it massively mattering to someone, presumably.”
Non-football fans will adore it. And most of us mired in the game, will enjoy a wry smile at the uncomfortable truth that football — like most major sports — reached saturation point long ago.
The fall-out from the coronavirus crisis has laid bare football’s prioritising of quantity over quality.
It has taken this indefinite lockdown for those governing the sport to fully realise the overkill they’d inflicted on audiences.
So can the current league season be finished? If so, how will it affect next season? What about cup competitions?
Well, if the calendar wasn’t horribly bloated — and this is true in the vast majority of major sports — then those problems would not be so tough to reconcile. Not even world-leading medical experts can accurately predict how long this pandemic will last.
So it would be sensible for sporting bodies to adopt a “foot on the ball” approach.
Do not call off future events too soon, do not make hasty plans to reschedule this season or next. Just calm the f*** down.
Whenever these nightmarish times abate, clubs must learn less is more — even if it means a drop in TV revenue.
Dave Kidd
Debate over what to do about a football season halted indefinitely while three-quarters complete, will always be mired in self-interest.
This column is no supporter of West Ham’s ownership but criticism aimed at vice-chairman Karren Brady for claiming the season should be null and void have been excessive.
Abandoning this season without relegation would clearly benefit West Ham, and other clubs, but it would also be one of the cleanest ways for football to get out of this mess.
Yet there are fewer accusations of self-interest levelled at Liverpool legend Kenny Dalglish when he claims: “We must be given time to finish (domestic) competitions. If that means we need to play every second night for three weeks during May or June, so be it.”
Talk of football returning in May or June is certainly optimistic. But the solution is not flogging footballers further on resumption.
We all know Liverpool are this season’s champions — whether or not they end up with an asterisk against their name from an incomplete campaign.
Whenever these nightmarish times abate, clubs must learn less is more — even if it means a drop in TV revenue.
CLUBS OVER COUNTRIES
One inevitability is today’s Uefa teleconference will lead to a year’s delay for Euro 2020. And with Europe’s largest clubs holding so much power, the temptation will be to sideline the international game further.
The next Uefa Nations League, a laudable and enjoyable tournament designed to make internationals more relevant, will likely fall by the wayside.
And the longer the world health crisis continues, the greater the pressure to scrap the Euro finals altogether. This must be resisted. The international game ought to be cherished. Nothing brings a nation together like a successful tournament campaign.
It remains the form of the game least tainted by greed and excess.
Nowhere else in football does financial clout have a smaller impact.
Spare a thought for Gareth Southgate and his fellow international managers, who’ve not had any fixtures since last November and now know there will be none until this autumn at the earliest — even if the England manager’s £4million salary for doing naff all, is hardly the greatest cause for sympathy.
Club chiefs will treat international football as the lowest priority and use this crisis to squeeze it further still, in the immediate aftermath and beyond.
But this is the height of short-sighted self-interest. International tournaments remain the pinnacle of the sport.
By accepting that internationals can be casually binned off, we’re falling for the agenda of the greediest, wealthiest clubs.
The clubs who made football’s swollen fixture lists such a prime target for ridicule and parody.
As the coronavirus crisis continues on, it will be internationals rather than club football that gets squeezed outCredit: Times Newspapers Ltd
UEFA plot four-team mini tournaments to decide Champions League and Europa League as coronavirus suspends season
Source: Soccer - thesun.co.uk
