https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/54295512 Spurs handed bye. Orient kicked out due to positive Covid tests Their game at the weekend suspended. Could just be the tip of the iceberg. If this continues to get worse could be fixture chaos in the lower leagues by January.
Dead right ( pardon the pun ) give it two to three weeks, be astounded if not another major lockdown and everything suspended.Growing exponentially at speed, the doubling will start reducing from a week to every three or four days. Nightmares ahead.
With very little testing being done in the EFL I think this is an accident waiting to happen. By all accounts Hull refused the offer of tests at West Ham because they were terrified of the implications of a positive test if cases are rising in the general public then they are certainly rising within the players. Time will tell but I can see fixture chaos
You can have byes in cups but not leagues. It would only take one team to miss 4 games to make it farcical. I'd make a rule now that 4 or my invalidates your results and you can't go up or down. It's harsh but it has to be pre-emptive not retrospective.
I still can't get my head round why the testing was not made mandatory for all professional leagues. Don't understand why the premier league have it, but not the EFL.
All down to money. At the time the cases were dropping and the testing was prohibitively expensive for clubs in our league. The problem is now that cases are rising again, and clubs are being caught with positive tests when they do get them, people will expect to see tests become mandatory. This is when the real problems will start, because a lot of clubs can't afford them without a bail out but also can't afford to mothball with no furlough.
In terms of the cost, I saw a quote from the Grimsby owner. It looks like about £150 a test, all players and support staff would need to be tested and seemingly it is needed twice a week. Worked out at least £7k. Their owner said “If we had to test every week we will have to close down,” said Philip Day, chairman of League Two Grimsby Town. “It’s as simple as that. “We have so far spent £20,000 on testing just to start the season. That was three sets of tests: return to training, halfway through training and just before the first game. “We’ve done our budgets and we’re looking at a loss of over £700,000 for the season. If you put £7,000 a week on top of that, you can see it wouldn’t be long before we ran out of money. And we wouldn’t be alone.”
https://www.mirror.co.uk/sport/foot...kCopy&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=sharebar Daily mirror reporting yesterday that any Premier league bail out would come at a cost potentially no relegation in the event of the league being halted. Slippery slope to a Premier league one and two in my opinion. The EFL are proving time and again to be just completely out of touch Can eventually see Prem 1 and 2 with all the cash and limited relegation / promotion EFL reduced to regional and part time leagues. Just another reason why we need to go up asap. If it happens there will be a big fence between the leagues and we don't want to be on the wrong side of it.
At the time of re-start, the government were pedalling it as a nationwide morale booster, seeing as they have schemes for businesses, surely Oliver Dowden or who ever should have had the foresight to implement the highest safety standards possible, that's the reason I labelled it as a debacle.
So does this mean that, if a Peterborough p[layer tests positive today, we get the 3 points tomorrow?? This seems utterly ridiculous to me
No, I believe the EFL had specific rules regarding teams not being able to fulfil cup fixtures due to the number of players out. Found them : 5.1 A Club which is unable to fulfil its obligation to complete a Competition match in Round One to (and including) Round Four due to either: 5.1.1 that Club’s Player(s) having returned a positive CAT result and self-isolating in accordance with the action plan set out in the Return to Play/Return to Training Protocols resulting in the Club not having a sufficient number of Players to fulfil the fixture; or 5.1.2 any requirements or directions of the UK Government and/or by any public authority, shall forfeit the fixture, pay the opposing Club’s expenses in accordance with Rule 5.8 and the opposing team shall receive a bye into the next round of the Competition So if it was only one player out they'd have been fine, if it was a league game they'd reschedule, but in a packed schedule they've agreed that if you can't field a team in the early rounds you have to forfeit
Very sadly was reading these rules this morning when I saw the first report. Interesting that if both teams have positive results then the tie is abandoned and no one goes through. Not sure how that works if you end up with an odd number of teams in the latter rounds
I think the next fixtures are already decided, so presumably whoever would have played the winner of that tie would just get a very fortuitous bye!
Yeah sorry I know that's the rule but Orient didn't HAVE to accept the money from Spurs to get the tests done. They did it as they were asked to not because they had to. They adhered as requested and have now been massively punished for this. "Pay the opposing club's expenses" **** man - a lower league club paying a PL team's expenses is ludicrous!! Just seems so heavily weighted to ensure that only the lower league clubs will be punished.
Must admit, it does seem to give an incentive to clubs not to get tested even though its massively immoral! But on the other hand it is a very packed schedule (especially for clubs in Europe) so I can understand them not wanting to mess around with having to get rearranged games in there. I mean, depending on the date of the test they'll likely need to isolate until after the next round has been played. Could see that getting very messy. So aye, I agree with everything you've said, but don't think the EFL necessarily got a huge choice in the matter
