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    Manchester City Routs Liverpool, Confirming the Obvious

    AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyOn SoccerCity’s Revival, Liverpool’s Fade and the Flaw in Overthinking ThemManchester City’s rout at Anfield provided some clarity in the Premier League title race. But the factors that led to it have been plain to see for months.Ilkay Gundogan missed a penalty but still scored twice in Manchester City’s 4-1 rout of Liverpool on Sunday.Credit…Pool photo by Jon SuperFeb. 8, 2021, 9:36 a.m. ETSometimes, the easy explanation tells the whole story. Or near enough, anyway. Why Liverpool’s crown as reigning Premier League champion has slipped before the first blooms of spring is no great mystery. There is little need to sift through performances, searching for some failure of character or imagination or ability, to understand how it came to this.Virgil van Dijktore a knee ligament on October 17, in the early minutes of the Merseyside derby. Not quite four weeks later, on November 11, his regular defensive partner Joe Gomez blew out a tendon while away on international duty with England. And that, to a large extent, was that. Liverpool’s aspirations, at that point, had to be downgraded.Soccer has a dispiriting tendency to scorn mitigating circumstances — in the lexicon of sports, explanation is too often seen as a synonym of excuse — as Roy Keane, the hard-boiled former Manchester United captain, rather neatly encapsulated in the aftermath of Liverpool’s humiliation by Manchester City on Sunday. “They’ve been bad champions,” Keane said. To be a “big club,” he said, is to cope with whatever setbacks are thrown your way.There is truth in that, but it carries with it an air of brutal, gleeful oversimplification. Liverpool cannot, of course, escape blame for the collapse of its title defense. The club chose not to add a central defender to its squad last summer, recruiting instead a reserve left back who made his first and only Premier League appearance in the dying minutes on Sunday. That seemed a risk even without the benefit of hindsight.At the same time, Jürgen Klopp, the club’s manager, has cut an increasingly waspish figure as the season has unfurled. He also must shoulder some responsibility, though. He has leaned too heavily on a handful of players, rather than sharing the burden more evenly. Even he has admitted that his squad is as mentally and physically drained as it looks.More important, Klopp has overseen a team that has become grinding and predictable, reliant on the methods that brought a Champions League triumph in 2019 and the Premier League last year, even as Liverpool’s high-energy, high-intensity press has tuned down and his raiding fullbacks have found their edge dulled.Liverpool’s opponents have learned — both Burnley and Brighton have won at Anfield in recent weeks, shutting down the champion using essentially the same playbook — but Klopp’s team has not, the manager apparently insistent on doing the same things over and over again in the desperate, vain hope that the outcome might be different next time.Goalkeeping errors by Alisson Becker led directly to two City goals.Credit…Pool photo by Jon SuperAnd yet all of that is inseparable from the fact that Liverpool has been playing for months without its first-choice central defense, and that its first reserve, Joel Matip, managed to start only nine Premier League games before his season, too, was ended by injury.To cope, Klopp has deconstructed his midfield, drafting first Fabinho and then Jordan Henderson into the back line. The team has lost its rhythm. A swarm of other injuries — Thiago Alcantara and Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain missing the first third of the season, Diogo Jota and Naby Keita the middle third, the usual wear-and-tear of a long, hard campaign — has left him with little choice but to play those members of his squad who were left standing.In those circumstances, trying to inculcate a new style of play is hardly realistic. Liverpool does need to evolve; with its resources, it should not be in a position where it is fretting about whether it can fend off West Ham, Everton and, possibly most pertinently, a surging Chelsea to finish in the top four. But in terms of retaining the title, it did not so much meet a setback as run into a roadblock.There is a useful contrast, here, with its most recent conqueror and its heir apparent. So entwined have been the fortunes of Liverpool and Manchester City over the last three years that there is now a temptation to see them as being somehow inextricably linked, the success of one taken as a direct indictment of the other’s failure.This season only seems to reinforce the parallel. Liverpool’s struggles this year do not perfectly match those City faced in the last one: Where City was volatile, scoring great rafts of goals only to freeze completely every few weeks, Liverpool’s fade has been a slow-burn demise, set in motion even before the title was won, the team sputtering through the autumn and only stalling completely at Christmas.But at first glance, the cause and the effect are the same: the lack of defensive cover, the oxygen debt to be paid after two seasons at the most rarefied heights, the sense of a wall being hit, all of it coalescing as Manchester City ran rampant at Anfield on Sunday, the pendulum swinging irrevocably back toward Pep Guardiola’s team.There is an easy explanation for that, too. Last summer, Guardiola and his employers knew their team needed more steel. City had lost nine games the previous season, its efforts to win a third straight title undone not only by Liverpool’s relentlessness but by its own glass jaw.So as much of European soccer fretted about the economic impact of the coronavirus and the subsequent shutdown, Manchester City went and spent $140 million on two defenders: Ruben Días and Nathan Aké. And that, to a large extent, was that. Días has, in the months since, emerged as the cornerstone on which Guardiola has built a new, parsimonious, indomitable version of City, one that is now set to reclaim the championship.In this case, though, the easy explanation only scratches the surface. Guardiola has not simply slotted a new central defender into his team and pressed play. He has, instead, retuned his approach. His team has been a touch less expansive, a touch more controlled, built on a more conservative midfield. He has overseen this shift in the space of a few months, on the back of a summer in which he did not have a preseason, during a campaign in which there is scarcely any time for training.City’s ability, and willingness, to rest its stars has set it up to reclaim the Premier League title.Credit…Pool photo by Jon SuperPartly, Guardiola has hinted, he took that risk — and it was, ultimately, a risk — to suit the realities of this most congested season. But partly, too, it was driven by the same impulse that made him recruit Días and Aké: an awareness that City needed to evolve once more if it was to outwit opponents who knew what to expect.What has enabled him to do that is the one element that has eluded Klopp. City has not been free of injury this season — Sergio Agüero has barely played, and both Gabriel Jesus and Kevin de Bruyne have missed considerable stretches — but its burden has been undeniably lighter than Liverpool’s.Nine of Klopp’s players have started 17 of Liverpool’s 23 Premier League games. Nine have already racked up 1,500 minutes in the league. At City, by contrast, only four players have reached those figures. Or, to put it another way, 13 of Guardiola’s players have started 10 games or more.It is to his credit that he has rotated that heavily. Guardiola has more readily understood the contingencies of this season than almost all of his peers; he spoke, around Christmas, of urging his team to run less, not more, in the early weeks of the campaign.But it does not immediately follow that it is to Klopp’s detriment that he has not had the same realization, that he has not altered Liverpool’s approach sufficiently to enable his players to cope with the test in front of them. It may be tempting to see Liverpool and City as counterweights — the rise of one a comment on the fall of the other — but the circumstances and the contexts are different. Klopp might have followed Guardiola’s lead, had he had the opportunity. Or not. It is impossible to know. Sometimes the easy explanation tells the whole story. And sometimes it does not.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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    Newcastle, Leeds and the Importance of Being … Something

    AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyRory Smith On SoccerNewcastle, Leeds and the Importance of Being … SomethingWandering about without a plan inspires neither affection nor success. So why do so many clubs still do it?Newcastle has won only one of its last 11 Premier League games.Credit…Pool photo by Stu ForsterFeb. 6, 2021, 7:00 a.m. ETNEWCASTLE, England — The sound system at St James’s Park crackled into life just as the whistle blew and the players took the knee, as they have done for every Premier League game since the spring. The announcement was brief and sweet, an unexpected relic of days past: “Enjoy the game.”In the silence, it was not quite clear who the announcer was addressing. There are only 300 people inside the stadium: the players on the field, the two coaching staffs, a handful of executives, a smattering of stewards and security and journalists. Everyone was there for work, rather than pleasure.And besides, even if the announcer’s words were meant for those in exile at home, the people who would ordinarily pack the empty stands, this is Newcastle United. Few, if any, of the fans would suggest they have enjoyed anything to do with this club for some time.Newcastle is — and has been for a long time — a club in the grip of endemic drift. Its owner, Mike Ashley, wants to sell, so much so that he has sought legal recourse against the Premier League for blocking a potential sale to a Saudi-led consortium last year.The fans, tired of Ashley’s absentee management and his lack of investment, either emotional or financial, want him gone so desperately that they appear ready to embrace any would-be savior, no matter how many concerns there might be about charges of content piracy or human rights abuses.If the loathing for Ashley is universal, the contempt for Steve Bruce — the manager installed by the owner last season — is getting there. It is not just that Bruce used to manage Sunderland, Newcastle’s fierce rival. It is not just that Bruce replaced Rafael Benítez, an object of adoration among the fans. It is not just that Bruce was appointed by Ashley and so — in a way that never applied to Benítez — is perceived as an emissary of a hated regime.Newcastle’s fans are confident they have identified the club’s problem.Credit…Eddie Keogh/ReutersIt is that Bruce, like Ashley, seems to have so little ambition for the club. He has articulated no grand vision of what Newcastle could be. His aspiration seems to stretch no further than stasis, the bare minimum required to maintain the club’s Premier League status. He has no vision beyond the literal wording of his job description: manager.In the middle of another difficult winter at Newcastle, Bruce spoke of addressing a slump in form by doing things “his way.” It was not entirely clear, then, whose way he had been following up to that point: He has been in charge for a season and a half. Quite what his way might be, too, remained a mystery.Those who have worked with him say that Bruce is a good coach, thorough and diligent and likable, if perhaps a little staid, a little cautious. But he espouses no distinct philosophy. He does not have a tightly-defined idea of how the game should be played, or what a squad should look like, or what a team should do. He does not seem to believe in anything in particular. He does not represent anything. He does not stand for anything.Steve Bruce’s Newcastle may be saved from relegation only because three teams are playing worse.Credit…Pool photo by Lee SmithHis counterpart last week, crouching on the touchline a few yards away, is the opposite. Before the game kicked off, Newcastle and Marcelo Bielsa’s Leeds United were not having vastly different seasons. Both were skirting the edges of the relegation battle: Leeds had 23 points and Newcastle 19, despite having played one extra game.The coverage of the teams — and the mood around them — could not, though, have been more different. Newcastle, as always, was a morass of discontent and bubbling crisis. Leeds, on the other hand, had taken the Premier League by storm, hailed by fans and neutral observers for their courage, their style, their adventure.Bielsa’s team had spent the season as a source of fascination and praise and, lately, a little resentment: No other team could lose by 6-2 to Manchester United, for example, and come out of it not just without criticism but with credit. Some of that, of course, can be attributed to the fact that Leeds, unlike Newcastle, was newly promoted, playing the Premier League for the first time in 16 years. Oscillations in form were to be expected, tolerated.But much of it is down to Bielsa. The Leeds that he has created is, innately, fun: fun to watch, and, though demanding and energy-sapping, apparently fun to be. His players give the impression they are enjoying themselves. Luke Ayling, the right back, charges out of defense like a toddler doped up on sugar. Jack Harrison scurries around like an eager Labrador. Stuart Dallas, in his first season in England’s top flight, has developed a taste for pinging cross-field passes. They put together wonderful, exuberant moves. They score intricate, breathtaking goals.More important, Bielsa’s dogmatism, his fundamentalism, his refusal to compromise his beliefs — all the things that, previously in his career, have been held against him — are now strengths. Leeds stands for something: a way of playing, a series of assumptions about how the game should be, a theory, a creed, an ideal.Leeds Manager Marcelo Bielsa has defenders, and critics. But his players know exactly what he expects.Credit…Andy Rain/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIn recent years, soccer has slowly, grudgingly accepted the idea that managers who adhere to a philosophy, a certain set of ideas, are not selling snake oil. It is understood, on some level, that possessing a clear sense of what you want your team to be offers a competitive edge: It helps recruit the right players, it makes coaching them more effective, it offers a barometer of success and purpose that is not reliant on individual results. At an executive level, it can even, at times, ease the transition between one manager and the next.But the benefits of a cogent philosophy are not purely sporting. It has been striking, in Leeds’s low moments under Bielsa, how little discord there has been about his methods. Most fans, if not all, are happy to absorb the lows as an unfortunate, but necessary, recompense for the highs.Subscribing to Bielsa’s philosophy gives them something to take pride and solace in, even when the score line offers no succor. It affords the club, and by extension the fans, an identity. They stand for something that does not depend on results. Newcastle is the opposite. A few days after losing to Leeds, Bruce’s team won at Everton. His side produced a smart, disciplined performance, and the victory alleviated mounting concerns over relegation. It did absolutely nothing to dispel the enduring unhappiness.That contrast, between Leeds and Newcastle, holds outside England’s two great one-club cities. Fans, increasingly, no longer see a manager talking about a philosophy and a vision as marketing jargon or corporate bunk. It is, instead, something to cling to and believe in, a reason to be proud.For much of this season, criticism has swirled around Graham Potter and Brighton. The team has lingered in the lower reaches of the table, its neat, attractive, flexible style of play winning plaudits but few games. He did not flinch when he was told he had to deviate from his methods to get results. More impressively, few of the club’s fans did, either. They understood, and appreciated, his plan. In the space of four days this week, Brighton beat Tottenham and Liverpool.The opposite is true at Chelsea. The dismissal of Frank Lampard and his replacement by Thomas Tuchel, vastly more qualified for the role, was made in order to win trophies; that, after all, is Chelsea’s modern, corporate identity. But it left fans feeling rootless: What mattered to them is not just the outcome, but feeling that the route taken has some deeper meaning.Newcastle has big-club resources. What it does not appear to have is a plan.Credit…Laurence Griffiths/Getty ImagesThis is not a uniquely English phenomenon. In Europe, fans “no longer recognize themselves in their clubs,” as Le Monde wrote of Bordeaux, Nantes and Marseille this week, three teams with no apparent broader purpose or identity. [A hat-tip to reader Manuel Buchwald for pointing me in the direction of that piece.]For years, fans have endured a growing sense of dislocation from their clubs, feeling unmoored as teams have morphed into superstores and retail brands and content farms and their players into millionaire entrepreneurs. That feeling will, of course, have only been exacerbated by the physical distance enforced by the pandemic.In that environment, clubs now effectively have to stand for something, anything: a reliance on youth, a certain style of play — expansive or exciting or muscular or intense, whatever it may be — or a distinct, bespoke approach. Those who do, like Leeds, earn not only patience from but also the admiration of their fans.Those who do not, like Newcastle, find that when there is no reason to enjoy the game — not the result, not the journey — the fire of fury and regret can quickly curdle into something much more dangerous for a business reliant on the unyielding affection of its public: apathy. That is the lesson Ashley, and Bruce, can teach the rest of soccer, that those who stand for nothing risk dwindling away into it.Maybe We Were Just Early in the Season?Why are these men smiling again? Take a look at the Premier League table.Credit…Pool photo by Nick PottsThis has been, you will have heard, the most unpredictable Premier League season in history. Well, since Leicester City won it, anyway. It has definitely been the most unpredictable season since that one, five years ago.The reality is slightly different. Yes, pretty much the whole top half of the Premier League might still nurse an ambition to qualify for European soccer next season. But the three teams at the foot of the table seem cut adrift, and by the close of play on Sunday, the title race might have swung fairly dramatically toward Manchester City.If City can beat an exhausted, uninspired and injury-ravaged Liverpool at Anfield, Pep Guardiola’s team most likely will have killed off the reigning champion’s dwindling hopes, and gone at least three points clear of its nearest rival — a vastly improved, but still unfinished Manchester United — with a game in hand. City has won 13 games in a row. It has not conceded a goal since the Franco-Prussian War. In a season of twists and turns, it has found a straight road.There is a strong possibility that, the race for the top four aside, a season that was meant to be marked by the unpredictable will end up with the most predictable outcome imaginable. And, though the circumstances of this year have been unusual, it feels as if this is a sensation we have had before.The table is always tight, chaotic, fluid for the first half of any season. The gaps between teams are smaller, because they have played fewer games, and so it takes a while to settle. In the opening few months, every season has an air of uncertainty.It is only now, as we turn the corner into the home straight, that order emerges. That has happened later, chronologically, this season — because the start was delayed by two months — but at the same time as it always does, in terms of games played. The effect has been more pronounced, thanks to the compacted schedule, the empty stadiums and the greater impact of injury and fatigue, but it is not unique. This is what always happens. It is just that we always forget.CorrespondenceThis Danny Ings goal was ruled offside. Yeah, we don’t know why either.Credit…Pool photo by Michael SteeleSadly, Laurence Dandurant has far too much clarity in his thinking to be consulted on how soccer can extricate itself from the nonsense — as any Southampton fan would describe it — it has made of its own offside rule. “Why don’t they change the offside rule to just a player’s boots? This would end the maddening shoulders and armpits debate.”Personally, I’m an advocate of the daylight rule — if any part of the player’s body is onside, the player is onside — but this works just as well.As I was expecting, last week’s column on the Old Firm inspired quite a bit of feedback, though (amazingly) none of it was especially angry. That must be a first. You raised quite a few points I’d like to address, so bear with me.“I completely agree with the sentiment of the Old Firm buying older players hampering their development on a European stage but think the greatest impact has been on the Scotland national team,” Benjamin Livingston wrote. “The Old Firm and the league as a whole are signing journeymen players from down south, rather than giving their own youth a chance.” This is a really important point: the future for Scotland, like (say) Belgium, is in having a much younger league.Catherine Pereira, meanwhile, pointed out that while Scotland’s men’s team has not been to a major tournament for two decades, its women’s team was at the World Cup in 2019, and performed credibly. “The team is ranked 21 in the world by FIFA,” she wrote. “It’s not great, considering Scotland’s history, but it’s not quite as disappointing as the men’s.” Quite right, too, though much of the praise for that should go to a Glasgow team that is not in the Old Firm.Glasgow City played a Champions League knockout-round match last year. Neither Rangers nor Celtic can say that.Credit…Alvaro Barrientos/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesWilliam Bradley noted, quite correctly, that last week’s piece ignored the sectarian roots of the Old Firm animosity. “Your story did not touch on or even mention [that], which I must say from your story’s journalistic quality.” That was deliberate. Everyone involved believes sectarianism to be a stain on Scottish soccer that should be left in the past. In a column addressing the future, I decided to take the same approach.And thanks to Ian Stewart, who has touched on something that is, I think, really important. “There seems to be a strain of thinking that prizes turning clubs into machines of player development, churning out young stars to be sold off to fund the next round of stars-in-development,” he wrote. “This is a front-office mind-set, not a fan’s. As a fan, I simply want to see the best team possible being fielded as often as possible.”This is a tension that a host of teams — right up to the likes of Borussia Dortmund — have to navigate: Soccer would lose a lot of its richness if everyone apart from the established financial elite decided their role was simply to feed the insatiable appetite of the powerful. There is a logical counterargument, though: The process of development-and-sale, if done well, can not only help you win today, but enable you to win more in future, as those funds are reinvested in better-quality players. Perhaps, in this case, a front-office mind-set is healthy.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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    With Man City Positives, Premier League's Coronavirus Outbreak Widens

    #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Coronavirus OutbreakliveLatest UpdatesMaps and CasesThe Stimulus PlanVaccine InformationF.A.Q.TimelineAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyRory Smith On SoccerThe Premier League Has a Schedule. It Really Needs a Plan.As the coronavirus invades locker rooms and postpones matches, soccer needs to face up to a potential worst-case scenario.Manchester City played without fans for months. On Monday, it couldn’t play at all.Credit…Laurence Griffiths/ReutersJan. 1, 2021, 10:00 a.m. ETOn the face of it, the Premier League’s decision was an easy and an obvious one. Manchester City and Manchester United had finished last season late, thanks to their commitments in the summer’s European competitions.To ensure that both teams would have a similar break between campaigns as all of their rivals, the Premier League decreed that they would start the new season a week later than everyone else. The league’s omnipotent fixture computer had drawn City against Aston Villa and United against Burnley for that first weekend of the season; those two games would have to be postponed.All of this, so far, makes sense. What happens next does not.Knowing that its teams were facing a compacted schedule anyway, the Premier League could have decided that Burnley and Villa might as well play one another on opening weekend. That may have raised some logistical challenges — policing, scheduling — but hardly insurmountable ones, particularly with fans still locked out of stadiums. The benefit, of having only one game, rather than two, to slot in later in a busy year, far outweighed the cost.That is not how soccer works, though, not even in a pandemic. Burnley did not play Aston Villa. The two games from the first weekend of the season have not been made up. It took until Thursday for the Premier League to find a window: They now will be played in the middle of January, five months late.That may seem a trivial issue, little more than a minor misstep, one that can doubtless be explained by the myriad complexities of scheduling a sporting season and will be easily resolved once the field in the domestic cup competitions is thinned a little. And, in some senses, that is all it is.Soccer has made the best of bad situations for months.Credit…Pool photo by Martin MeissnerBut it is also an instructive example of how the Premier League — and elite soccer as a whole — thinks, how pervasive is its belief in its own relentlessness, how delicate and vulnerable this season remains. The simple fact that Burnley did not play Aston Villa on opening day encapsulates soccer’s myopia, and its hubris.The Premier League lost two more games this week. First, Manchester City requested the postponement of its trip to Everton after five of its players tested positive for coronavirus. Fearing a more widespread outbreak — and much to Everton’s surprisingly public chagrin — the Premier League acquiesced. (Pep Guardiola revealed Friday that City will be missing five players who had tested positive when it plays Chelsea on Sunday.)About 48 hours later, Fulham had to make the same request, canceling its match with Tottenham on only a few hours notice; it, too, had recorded a spate of positive test results, and in the interest of public health, it was determined the game should be delayed, despite the unhappiness of noted Instagram influencer José Mourinho.City and Fulham were not the first clubs to be hit by the virus. In November, Newcastle had to close its training facility and skip a game against Aston Villa after an outbreak that has left at least two players with the kind of persistent and debilitating symptoms doctors refer to as Long Covid. Those clubs will, it is safe to assume, not be the last. Sheffield United played its game against Burnley this week despite reporting a number of positive tests at the club.The situation in the Football League, which governs the second, third and fourth tiers of soccer in England, is even worse. In League One, seven of the 12 games scheduled to be played on Tuesday had to be postponed because of coronavirus outbreaks. Five had been missed on Boxing Day, too. There have been calls from some medical departments for a two-week “circuit-breaker” pause to the season to avoid players’ being overloaded by a backlog of matches in the spring.It does not feel as if any of this was especially difficult to foresee. Soccer cannot be blamed, of course, for failing to anticipate the scale of the second wave of the pandemic in Britain (or anyplace else), or for the appearance of a particularly virulent mutation of the virus in the southeast part of England.Fans have adapted to new realities. Leagues should, too.Credit…Pool photo by Paul ChildsBut it should not have required the clarity of hindsight to project that cases might rise in the winter, that the long-anticipated second wave might have some impact on soccer, that the bubbles the sport was relying on to play through might not prove entirely impermeable, that some sort of contingency plan might be needed.And yet soccer seems woefully underprepared for something that should have been wholly predictable. It is not just that there is little room in the calendar set aside to play postponed matches: just three weekends in the English season set aside for teams to make up games they have missed, but only if they are eliminated from the domestic cups first.It is that — as the Premier League confirmed in a statement this week — the subject of what happens if the season is paused, or worse, canceled entirely, has not even been discussed.(It is striking, though perhaps not vastly surprising, that two of the most ardent voices calling for cancellation on moral grounds in the spring, Aston Villa and West Ham, have been quiet this time. It’s almost as if they are keener to play now that they are fifth and 10th in the table, respectively.)To be clear, at this point, there is no reason to believe the season should be curtailed: Soccer has proved, over the last nine months, that it is able to play on. It has not increased the burden on the country’s medical services, or deprived the general population of tests, or been responsible for a more widespread outbreak of the virus. Its protocols, for the most part, have worked.But it is hardly outlandish to suggest that the Premier League — and most of its peers around Europe — might have looked at what happened in the spring and wondered if perhaps they needed to have a plan in place should the worst-case scenario unfold.Fans at Brighton. European stadiums that opened recently may soon close again.Credit…Glyn Kirk/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThat need not have meant an immediate end to any season; other, more creative solutions were available. Something along the lines of the bubble tournament staged by the N.B.A., for example, or a shortened season — along the lines of what is already standard in Scotland and Belgium — might have served as an adequate break-glass course of action. Only if those workarounds were not possible would a nonsporting conclusion come into force.The Coronavirus Outbreak More