I miss football, but here are 20 reasons why the game won’t come back until social distancing is over
I am missing football, quite badly. The rhythm of the week has been profoundly disturbed. For me, a Burnley game at the end of the week is crucial to that rhythm. The anticipation helps deal with other challenges through the week. The match is the fulcrum around which whole weekends are planned.
For me, it is a social life, a cultural life, a sporting life wrapped into one. For football fans there is always something to look forward to, the next match, the next season, the next transfer window, the next cup run – so many nexts. Now all we have to look forward to, in the immediate future, is emptiness, confusion, and uncertainty about when this void in our lives will be filled.
It is not just Burnley I miss. It is a weird feeling to slump down on the sofa at the end of the day, and find pretty much nothing on Sky Sports or BT Sport that I want to watch. I can’t help thinking Sky Sports News should just shut down for a while, rather than pretend that a sports channel is the best place to keep up to date with the Covid-19 developments.
Also, repeats of past matches, no matter how good they might have been at the time, are no replacement. I am even missing commentator Martin Tyler shouting, “And it’s live”, which, in normal times, I turn the sound down. And I am definitely missing presenter Jeff Stelling and team on the Saturdays when Burnley don’t have a game.
I am lucky in a way. I know, and talk to, lots of people in football. Burnley manager Sean Dyche has probably called me more than any other human being, mainly to ask what is going on in government. As if I might have an answer.
I am also in WhatsApp groups with some of the players. But none of it can make up for the fact two Saturdays ago, at 3pm, one of my favourite away grounds, Selhurst Park, was empty as Crystal Palace v Burnley (a fixture most Premiership players view as the battle of the clubs with the two worst dressing rooms in the league), should have been kicking off; or that last Saturday, same time, my seat at Burnley was looking out, with 22,000 other empty seats, onto the beautiful turf of Turf Moor, when we should have been be playing against Sheffield United, in a War of the Roses derby between two proper clubs in with a chance of a Europa League spot.
So nobody would be happier than I if we could get football back into our lives. People need entertainment. People need sport. Millions are feeling as I do, that something big is missing,
My sons Rory and Calum, who have inherited the football gene, much to the disappointment of their opera-and-ballet-loving mother, are adamant that if the government and the football authorities do not manage to get competitive football back in our lives, and on our screens soon, then, not to put too fine a point on it, millions will go mad.
But how can football even be played though, in the era of social distancing, when we are supposed to be staying two metres apart? Behind closed doors, packing in game after game, day after day, night after night, to try to finish the season, with the teams all quarantined with each other in a fan-free football zone, these are among the ideas being kicked around ...
1. No Keane-Vieira death stares in the tunnel.
2. It would take an age to get the players onto the pitch. Burnley’s tunnel is not even two metres wide (Palace’s is even narrower) so the teams would have to come out separately, in a 22 metre train, with another fourteen metres for the subs, and, at some clubs, another 40 metres for the backroom staff.
3. New benches needed, along the whole of one side of the pitch, to accommodate the above.
4. No fair play handshaking. OK, not a great loss.
5. No coin toss. We can live with that too. It is not hard to find other ways to decide who kicks off.
6. No huddles. Would Celtic even be able to play without a huddle before kick-off?
7. No throw-ins. Well, you could have thrown ins, but you would also need water, soap and hand sanitisers pitch-side for every time a player touched the ball. This is not going to work, despite the obvious sponsorship opportunities.
8. No tackles. This is a big one. Tackles might not be what they were in the Norman Hunter era, but they’re still an integral part of the game, and I don’t see how you can tackle while maintaining a two-metre distance unless every player is well over six feet tall and flies in two-footed, horizontally, flattening the other player immediately.
9. No man marking.
10. No player-trains at corners.
11. No shirt-pulling.
12. No goalkeepers ‘charging through bodies’ to claim a ball at corners.
13. Loads more time wasting. The new game management – go one up, then next time you’ve got the ball, get to the corner flag, and stay there. There’s nothing in the rules of the game to say you can’t.
14. No buying of free kicks by backing into a defender then falling over. This would seriously blunt Ashley Barnes’s effectiveness and I am not having that.
15. No walls at free kicks. None without very large gaps anyway.
16. No managerial team conflabs. I’m not sure I could enjoy a game without Sean Dyche turning to Ian Woan and Tony Loughran, saying, “Eh lads”, with a flick of the head, then having a touchline conflab with their hands shielding their mouths from lip readers.
17. No touch line bust-ups. Likewise for the full entertainment factor, I need assistant manager Ian Woan and goalkeeping coach Billy Mercer to lose it with the other side’s coaches. I need Sean Dyche to march to the fourth official and ask “What the hell is that about?” as yet another decision goes the way of a “big club”?
18. No fights. Another “this is the last thing we want to see on a football field” myth here. Fans love seeing players get into a rumble, even if it is only so-called “handbags”. We really love proper stuff that goes beyond the pushing and shoving. But social distancing means all that is gone.
19. No proper goal celebrations. When we score the 89th minute goal that clinches that Europa League place, away at Liverpool, I want Barnesy to pile into the away end, and I want the players to pile in after him. Are they really going to just stand there and nod at each other from two metres, and say, “Well done Barnesy”?
20. Oh, I forgot, there won’t be any fans there anyway.
You see, this is not as easy as it sounds.
Right, now off to watch highlights of Burnley v Stockport in the second division play-off final, May 1994, on YouTube. David Eyres with one of the finest goals ever scored at Wembley, Gary Parkinson with one of the best goal celebrations ever seen at Wembley. He jumped the pitch-side fence to pile in with the fans. It’s why we love him. It’s why we love football. It’s why we want it back, but I think we had better get used to the idea – it won’t be any time soon.
