THERE must be something seriously strange going around, given that we got a lot of common sense out of Uefa yesterday.
The postponement of Euro 2020 by a year was an inevitable no-brainer and Uefa chief Aleksander Ceferin was right to rule out the prospect of staging such a jamboree of football behind closed doors.
The Champions League should be the big casualty for European football if club chiefs seriously want to finish the domestic seasonCredit: Reuters
UEFA president Aleksander Ceferin was spot on in his desire for Euro 2020 not to go ahead this year and to have fans thereCredit: EPA
European football bosses were also correct to put their foot on the ball and set up a working party about the conclusion of domestic leagues, as the world gets to grips with the full scale of the Covid-19 pandemic.
But unless medical experts are being hopelessly pessimistic about the length and scale of the crisis, pretty soon some tougher choices must be made.
Scrapping this season’s Champions League and Europa League, along with all incomplete domestic knockout competitions like the FA Cup, looks like an eminently logical way out of the fixture pile-up which will exist even if football is able to resume in the summer.
The proposal to promote Leeds and West Brom — with no relegation — and extend the Prem to 22 teams for next season is surely a nonsense.
The nature of league football dictates those competitions must be prioritised and played to a completion if possible.
With the European competitions only at the last-16 stage and the FA Cup quarter-finals having been scheduled for the coming weekend, no club is going to feel too hard done by should those competitions be ditched.
The same cannot be said if relegation and promotion issues, as well as European places for next season, are somehow decided on the basis of incomplete campaigns.
And should the entire 2019-20 season be declared null and void, then there will certainly be legal challenges made.
The proposal to promote Championship front-runners Leeds and West Brom — with no relegation — and extend the Premier League to 22 teams for next season is surely a nonsense.
However long this thing takes to abate, we need less football, not more, going forward.
Even if football is back by June (and there should not be too much confidence about that), then domestic leagues are likely to be staging two rounds of fixtures per week. The unnecessary burdens of cup ties, domestic and European, would only add to the logjam.
And the League Cup — already being earmarked for abolition by Ceferin, Manchester City boss Pep Guardiola and many others — may see its demise hastened by the coronavirus.
Scrap it for next season, to ease the knock-on effects of fixture congestion, and England’s largely unloved second knockout competition will surely be gone for good.
Wilfried Zaha heads to Beckenham Goals for a kickabout as Premier League suspended over coronavirus pandemic
Source: Soccer - thesun.co.uk
