SaintBobby

Last few matches really do ease any tiny remaining fears of relegaton, surely?

If you squint at the league table, cross your fingers and pray, it's just about possible for us to qualify for the Europa League (assuming 8th place would be sufficient) Heck of a long shot, but just about conceivable.

Glad to bury yet another football myth....namely, "if you start slow, it's very hard to pick up the pace". Rubbish. We started really poorly. Not sure why. Maybe Norwich just burnt themselves out in the first 15 mins? We cruised it from there, really. Ings was superb - made at least three great contributions defensively too. But I'd also highlight Redmond - didn't see much of the ball in the first half, but looked great through out every time he was involved. Happy days. Safety is now (even more) assured.

I've heard "late August or early September". Didn't know they'd agreed to Sept 12th, if they have. Gets tricky if they leave it too late as Euros are in June, right?

The weird thing about that Hawkeye screw-up was Sky discussing that there was a window of one minute and 9 seconds where they could have used VAR. Sure, there was also a shorter window where they could have used, you know, "eyesight."

Thanks for your work on this, Steve.

That is true....but why is the line drawn between seasonal flu and Covid-19? We seem to be wiling to do absolutely everything to combat the latter, but not to really disrupt our lives at all to combat the former. The former does kill about 10,000 a year every year (sometimes 20,000+). It seems a relatively small sacrifice to simply suspend the football season over the Winter to mitigate this. I'm not suggesting a full on, economy-wide lockdown, just no football in, say, December, January and February to limit the spread of flu. Seems a small price to pay to save some lives. Football just isn't that important. The numbers of lives saved could be dozens, maybe even hundreds.

No, but seasonal flu is. we may want to adopt a mid-season winter break in future to ensure that players like Danny Rose, who can survive flu easily, doesn't catch it and then pass it on to his grandparents. Can't be too careful.

the deaths from other causes are also age specific. Example: v few people die from fireworks, those who do are typically not under 40 (they will survive some nasty burns). Same goes for lightning strikes - the fittest are more likely to survive a hit. It is true that the C19 numbers are based on current deaths - so you might think lockdown has kept a zero or more off the death toll. Maybe it has. So far though, the number who have died is like a very bad bout of seasonal flu. That tends to kill about 10,000 people a year - but in 2014/5, it killed 28,000 Brits - not massively different to the number currently killed by C19. The number of people under 50 who have died from C19 is vanishingly small in aggregate terms - not far off a rounding error to zero. The average age of a death from C19 is 82 in a country where life expectancy is actually just 81.

The latest statistics suggest that someone under the age of 19 with no existing pre-conditions in the UK faces the following fatality risks compared to Covid19: ....210 times as likely to be killed in a car accident (with a pre-esiting condition it's still 69 times as likely) If under the age of 40 (basically all footballers), WITH pre-existing conditions: ....You are about 50% more likely to die by being attacked by a dog or being struck by lightning in the UK. Under-40s with NO pre-exiting conditions: ....about twice as likely to die from a discharged firework and 5 times as likely to die from being struck by lightning. Given these numbers, I think we can probably re-open the academy and possibly the wider club for all players. But we should probably bus the players into Staplewood rather than allow them to drive themselves, hire a metereologist to keep an eye out for thunderstorms and also ensure we have a licenced dog handler on hand at all times. We should also cancel any club celebrations of Guy Fawkes night and New Years Eve until further notice, in order to guarantee their safety.

I watched Leipzig v Freiberg, which was an adequately good match. Agree it's weird without crowd/sound/atmosphere....I think I favour the TV stations finding a way to fake that, although I usually hate TV gimmickry.

That seems a little high, but God knows what sort of penalty clauses are involved in what will be a very complex contract. From a financial perspective, I still think the Premier League can end up quids in if they move to have all remaining c 90 matches televised. Worldwide audiences will be huge - especially with Euro 2020 having bitten the dust. Before someone says "it's all about money", no it isn't. It's party about money and it's about making a senisble trade off. You don't sacrifice hundreds of millions of pounds to reduce the risk of one person dying from, say, 1% to 0.5%. If you think that we should (if we face these sort of numbers), then a whole lot more needs to change beyond just cancelling the rest of the season (24 hour check in times at airports, maximum speed limits of 25mph, strict rationing of alcohol to no more than a pint a day per person...that sort of stuff). Overall, Germany seems to have handled the whole crisis far better than we have. A far better healthcare system than the NHS, way fewer deaths, the economy starting to return to normal and footall resumign today. We have a lot to learn from them and probably not much to teach them.

A statistician I was talking to yesterday told me that the risk to the players' health and lives is now probably greater from them driving to a match than playing a match. There were a LOT of riders to this (driving casualties are low at the moment because the roads are pretty empty, for example). The point is that we can't ever play a game of football at zero risk, the question is when and whether risks are so low that it's okay to do so. By June 12th, I think we may well have reached this point.

If Hojbjerg goes, I think it makes it more important - by far - to keep Romeu. I'm not a huge fan of either of them tbh, but they have been solid 6-7/10 performers and I'd like to keep one bird in the hand.

We should also now move to a winter break in football forever more. Not for football reasons, but for public health reasons. Seasonal flu has a 0.1% death rate in the UK and we wouldn't want football players picking up the virus and then transmitting it to their parents. People die when that happens. Covid-19 looks like it has a 0.5% death rate. I'm not yet sure whether we should shut down all spectator sports - and the entire global economy - at 0.1% or 0.5% or somewhere in between. So, as ever, thoughts welcome.

I assume they will have to refuned season tickets for the unplayed home games in any event. Not finishing the season would be bad news for football in general and probably for Saints more than most.

I might start following a German team. Looks like the Bundesliga is restarting soon. Spain too? Apparently, back in Blightly, we might need to accept that we can't even play next season in any proper way. Or rewrite the rules about it. Or something. Gees. How the mighty have fallen.

Scrapping relegation would be ridiculous. Might as well just arrnage a handful of play-off matches to resolve the Euro slots somehow. I guess a compromise might be to reduce relegation to two slots rather than three (and have one extra team in the top flight next year)?

no special treatment at all is suggested. If you can run football and give a major financial boost to our NHS though, why not do so? I’d apply the same to the hypothetical family BBQs and small music concerts. If these things will cost the NHS £x but raise £5x, then let’s do it.

If you want to minimise total deaths as an absolute top priority, probably best to cancel football permanently - irrespective of coronavirus.

It's a question of difficult trade offs really. If restarting the season would make £500m, but ten people would get slightly ill, it's worth it. Obviously the tricky bit is calculating what the likely trade offs are at least as much as workign out if they are worth it.

I'm not so sure about that. I think it's a bit above 50-50 that they will complete the season, even if that delays the start of next season. Lockdown will probably start to ease after the bank holiday weekend and may ahve eased a lot by June or July.

Yep. I guess you would need to impose some sort of lockdown/isolation for the duration of the mini-season and thereafterwarsd too. Separate hotels and hotel rooms for each club and associated officials. Compulsory testing and isolation for all those involved for 7-14 days at the conclusion of the seson etc. My general point is that you obviosuly can't reduce the risks to zero, but you can reduce them very substnatially with sufficient resources and football is wealthy enough to provide these resources.

It's a fair point, but the finances available in football also allow them to pay substantial money to mitigate and lower the risks. I'm imagining the details, but you could see the circumstances/legal requirements being as follows: 1. All those not practising social distancing must have been tested (at full market rate) three times in the previous fortnight - only those testing continually negative can play. 2. All those involved on "the fieled of play" must be aged under 40. 3. All those involved must be tested twice in the week after the match (at full market rate) 4. Any individual or group wishing to run an event or match represents a potential drain on NHS resources, to this end the organisers of the event must pay to secure a licence, the cost of which is £50,000 per event/match and earmarked directly for the NHS budget. These rules could apply to anyone seeking special exemption, but I imagine it's unlikely that you would seek to clear these hurdles to play a small music venue or arrange a family BBQ. If you do, that's fine though. Football could, of course, easily meet the costs of complying.

Not at all sure about the veracity of the OP's info, but seems plausible to me they will complete the season in this sort of format. Sure, I get the argument that - on the face of it - it looks like favouritism for football, but there are some reasons to treat football differently to, say, reopening garden centres or clothes shops. 1. Footballers themselves are in an incredibly low risk category. Fatalities amongst fit and healthy 20-30 year olds are near zero. The risk of infection is real, but the consequences are less severe comapred to - say - hundreds of 70-year olds visting garden centres, 2. The finances of football mean non-completion of the season could be catastrophic for clubs - the state furlough scheme, for example, proably covers 80% of the wages of garden centre employees, but hardly scratches the wage bill for players at football clubs. 3. The financial upside of restarting the season could be huge - the global TV audiences for Premier League football (in the absence of any other major sport on TV and if large numbers of people are still in lockdown at home) could be enormous. Re-opening garden centres or pub with social distancing measures might see their revenues get to, say, 25% of normal. For football - depending on the TV rights package - you could imagine revenues being above normal. (Every single match televised at £10 PPV, for example). 4. I guess an argument could just about be made that it would be good for national morale, more so than reopening B&Q perhaps. There are still all sorts of problems - the unfairness of losing the Home-Away difference (probably helps Saints though!) etc. But there might be ways to mitigate this (maybe only relegate two teams this season, for example?)