Jimmy_D

He should do, looks like he didn't for some reason.

WTF!? First time I've seen goal line technology fail. Surely they should have checked that with VAR?

Sometimes I think they must put these stories out just to see the reaction on here

I'm not sure why'd you'd expect that sort of information to be available less than 24 hours after the games. More in general, in Germany the r rate has ticked up with the easing of the lockdown there. That will cost lives. Whether it will cost more lives than keeping the economy closed would have is the calculation they're having to make.

Yeah, it just feels like the game is empty. It’s supposed to be a derby game but it feels like there’s nothing at stake.

Yeah, can't see them actually starting that soon. It does look like it'll potentially remove the roadblock of social distancing rules preventing it returning though.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/52619111 Looks like 1st June is the earliest possible time we can expect any football. I'd imagine that would depend on what sort of state the lockdown is in by then.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/52619111 No professional sport to take place before 1st June.

It was only 9 days after May 1st, I’m not sure any Saints fan that was around back then will have any memory of it

Unfortunately it looks like the easing of the lockdown in Germany is failing. Looks like it’s being passed on to more than one person on average by each infected person again. They’re going to have to tighten it up again.

The main problem with that is asymptomatic transmission. Younger people might not be at a big risk of dying from it, but they can spread it around to people that are, possibly without even knowing they ever had it.

You have, thank you for that. Unfortunately it looks like they were small scale occurrences which could have been anecdotal. Obviously they’ve come to prominence now but at the time I’d guess they’d have been overlooked in the tidal wave of research about a novel coronavirus. As well as the lag between research being carried out and it being published, you get a lag between it being published and acted upon. That was a missed opportunity.

So you think the government should make a habit of basing policy on unverified scientific evidence?

https://academic.oup.com/jid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/infdis/jiaa119/5807958 This was the earliest one I saw, the weekend of the races. Happy to be corrected if there was earlier evidence published.

It’s easy to say things should have been done differently with hindsight. No doubt that weekend of big events has cost lives, but at the time, it was thought that it probably wasn’t transmissible without symptoms. That one single ability is what made this so much more dangerous. Without that, people would have an indication that they needed to lock themselves down and it would have been as effective as the current measures locking everyone down, as well as giving an indication to other people that thay need to distance themselves from someone, people remembering they’d been near someone with symptoms etc.

I don’t suppose when WWII started, anyone was expecting to have to deal with that being reality for six years. You’re going to have to get your head around the fact that we’ll be dealing with this for as long as it takes, because it really doesn’t care what we think of it. It just ‘is’. You might be happy to take your chances, but the restrictions are in place to protect everyone else from you, as well as to protect you. Why does the fact that someone has an underlying health condition mean that you’d be willing to let them die from this? Trying to pretend that this isn’t happening and everyone has overreacted isn’t going to help you. Pretending that everything is going to suddenly go back to normal isn’t going to help you.

Unfortunately it looks like we’re going to get a real world example of what it looks like to just ignore it, judging by what’s happening in Brazil.

True, not everyone is benefiting from that effect, I can't imagine what it must be like to be in that situation. Overall though, road traffic accidents are down, according to fitbit, people's resting heart rate is reduced, air pollution is down, A&E departments are facing a vastly reduced demand... etc.

We're currently effectively in a total war situation. All the resources we have can possibly muster are being thrown at healthcare at the moment. Social distancing and lockdown measures are in place, which is not only vastly reducing the effect of COVID-19, but is vastly reducing the risk of other causes of death as a side effect. Despite this, deaths are still vastly higher than they were over the same period last year. You're not comparing like with like when looking at those figures, and it's giving you a false picture that COVID-19 isn't as bad as it is. Going back to normal would be false economy anyway, the effect of COVID-19 unchecked would wipe out any benefit from restarting the economy and then some. It's not going to happen.

Would the matches between the winners of the Football League and the winners of the Southern League have been filmed? We were in a few of those back then.

Even with all the measures put in place we're likely to see this kill as many people here as the Blitz did. I've only heard people pointing out that the measures probably didn't go far enough. The 500,000 figure is real. It's what would likely have happened without those measures. Yes, they're wrecking the economy, but every country in the world has decided it's worth it to put measures like that in place. If you're facing possibly losing your income due to this, then I'm sorry, it's a horrible thing to happen, and I hope it turns out ok for you. The best advice I can give you is to make sure you're aware of what you'd need to do to claim financial support, just in case you need it, and find out whether there's anything you can do to mitigate or delay outgoings if you need to. I've already been doing this myself. Unfortunately, hoping that everything can somehow suddenly all go back to normal isn't likely to help you much.

I assume from your comments that coronavirus wouldn't affect you or anyone you know then?

I don't think we're likely to be able to play for a fair while yet. Like I said, the rules can be changed ahead of a new season to take into account the possibility of the need to extend the season or decide on the results of a curtailed season, as well as the rules around registration of players, changing the transfer window, required clauses in players' contracts etc. Unfortunately, trying to press ahead as if conditions have improved enough to safely play football isn't going to make it real. I think we need to face up to the prospect that football is going to be on the back burner for a while yet.

The difference between what happens with the current season and what happens with next season is that this season was started with absolutely no provisions in place for what should happen in the event that something stopped the season from completing. So we now have a situation where there's absolutely no way to fairly complete the current season under the rules that it was started under. Most sports under those conditions would declare an event null and void, but there's so much money in football that it poses an existential threat to clubs and maybe even to leagues themselves to miss out on that money, so we might end up with some sort of unhappy compromise to try and retain as much of that as possible. Next season could have new rules in place to cover what should happen in the event of something massive preventing the end of a season, with the agreement of all teams, as well as the TV companies, in advance.

Go back to 'normal'? What do you think that would look like at the moment?