the times | Wednesday January 19 2022 61
Sport
Spain
La Liga has yet to call off a
single fixture this season.
By the end of December,
more than 200 players in the
top two divisions had tested
positive but an openness to
playing youngsters has kept
fixtures on. The criterion for a
game to go ahead is “at least
five first-team players and a
goalkeeper”.
La Liga allows a top-flight
team only one postponement
until April 1. A club would have
to forfeit any further fixtures
they could not fulfil.
Barcelona travelled to play
Mallorca on January 2 with
only nine first-team players
after ten players tested positive
for Covid.Italy
Daily case figures hit a record
high of more than 220,000 onJanuary 11, yet after 22 rounds
of Serie A action, only five
games have been affected.
But there has been some
chaos. Various regional health
authorities have enforced
quarantine or travel bans on
local clubs, therefore leaving
clubs whose games were not
postponed by the league’s
governing body, with
contradicting instructions. One
team showed up and waited
until half-time for the game to
be abandoned officially.
The problem appears to
have been fixed. Teams will be
stopped from fulfilling fixtures
only if positive cases in the
squad reach 35 per cent.Germany
The regulations of the German
Football League (DFL), which
oversees the Bundesliga and
Bundesliga II, allow a motion topostpone a match only if a club
have fewer than 15 players
available, of which nine have to
be registered league players
including one goalkeeper. The
open spots can be filled with
youth players. The DFL has
postponed only one game, in
Bundesliga II, this season.
The Bundesliga’s latest
matchday had an average
attendance of about 1,000.France
Only three matches in Ligue 1
have been postponed because
of the Omicron variant.
Protocols oblige all players in
Ligue 1 and Ligue 2 to undergo
tests 48 hours before a game,
whether vaccinated or not.
The league’s rules stipulate
that for a game to be called off
at least 11 players from the 30-
man squad list must have
tested positive.T
here have been some classic dives over
the years. I don’t think I will ever
forget Morten Gamst Pedersen
tripping on thin air while through on
goal for Blackburn Rovers a few years
ago, or Fernando Torres turning into Tom
Daley for Spain against Chile. In the latter case,
the Spaniard managed to rotate a full 360
degrees, a piece of method acting of which
Robert De Niro would have been proud.
But we have, I think, moved into a new era of
simulation. I am not talking about players
seeking to hoodwink referees, I am referring to
the insidious attempt by clubs to game Covid
rules in pursuit of postponements, making a
mockery of the fixture list and overturning any
semblance of logic. Arsenal, for instance,
managed to delay their match against
Tottenham Hotspur at short notice despite
having only two positive Covid cases at the time
of their request. Isn’t this a kind of
institutionalised simulation?
I don’t want to minimise the difficulties of
scheduling a 20-team round-robin contest such
as the Premier League during a pandemic, albeit
one hopefully coming towards a denouement,
but these postponements are becoming
insulting. Insulting to fans who have made plans
to travel to games, to TV audiences who expect
fixtures to go ahead if at all possible, and to the
concept of sporting integrity. So far 22 matches
have been postponed in the Premier League,
compared with none in the German equivalent,
which seems keen to press ahead rather than
pander to clubs.
And it is not just the fact that clubs are
gaming the rules but the growing sense that the
rules themselves are all over the place. Why, for
instance, do suspensions apparently count
towards the tally of players who are unavailable
to play? Are these not the responsibility of the
clubs? Why do absences due to the Africa Cup
of Nations seem to carry equal weight as those
caused by positive Covid tests? Then there are
the players who are deemed injured, a catch-all
category that gives clubs huge discretion when
liaising with the Premier League over the
question of availability.
I also cannot help wondering why young
players are not included in the tally; yes, even
those who lack first-team experience. Wouldn’t
the opportunity to give teenagers a chance to
play at the highest level be a potential benefit of
keeping the Premier League show on the road?
Leeds United, to their credit, fielded eight
under-23 players (including seven teenagers) on
the substitutes’ bench against West Ham United
Arsenal risk provoking another back-
lash from their Premier League rivals as
they prepare to offload two more squad
members having managed to get Sun-
day’s north London derby postponed
because of a lack of available players.
The club have terminated Sead
Kolasinac’s contract with six months
remaining, while the centre back Pablo
Bending rules
is Covid version
of diving cheats
in a super match on Sunday. The Times
reported: “They were aggressive in taking the
game to West Ham, they scrapped, they created
and never wilted after twice losing the lead.”
The depressing thing, though, isn’t just the
subjectivity with which the rules are applied, or
their lack of transparency, but the attempt by
clubs to exploit every loophole. Arsenal are
supposed to be struggling to field a team but
they managed to send two players — Ainsley
Maitland-Niles and Folarin Balogun — out on
loan last week. It also emerged that they were
preparing to dispatch Pablo Marí, the Spanish
defender, to Udinese but without yet being
certain they will have enough players to fulfil
tomorrow’s Carabao Cup semi-final second leg
against Liverpool. This looks ridiculous.
In short, the system is broken. Fans are angry,
Premier League officials are embattled and even
the clubs are descending into mutual suspicion.
I doubt there was any conspiracy in the volume
of false positive results at Liverpool, which led to
the postponement of the first leg of their
Carabao Cup semi-final against Arsenal, but I
was not surprised when my timeline got clogged
with terms such as “lemon juice” (apparently,
one of the means to generate fake results). Isn’t
this the kind of cynicism that erupts when
inadequate rules interact with a critical mass of
bad-faith actors?
It isn’t only Arsenal, of course. Leicester City
and Watford have had three successful
postponement applications and nine more clubs
have had one or more. Burnley were successful
in their applications for delayed matches at the
weekend and again this week despite their
under-23s fielding a full side on Monday night.
Could they not have played? If nothing else,
would this not have helped Burnley to avoid
fixture congestion at the end of the season?
To be clear, I am not saying that all
postponements are unjustified; merely that
residual faith in the system has vanished. Few
people believe the clubs, the clubs have stopped
trusting each other and the hapless officials at
the Premier League are just hoping the entire
mess will go away. As Gary Neville put it on
Twitter: “What started out as postponements
due to a pandemic has now become about clubs
not having their best team. The Premier League
must stop this now, draw a line in the sand and
say all games go ahead unless you have an
exceptional amount of CV cases. It’s wrong.”
I agree that it is time for a reset; time for the
Premier League to publish new rules, hopefully
with a little more clarity and considerably more
logic. I suspect that most fans would welcome
this and the system as a whole would benefit. In
short, games should go ahead except in
extremis. As Neville — again the voice of sanity
— put it: “33 players and staff test positive for
Covid out of 13,600 tests. We don’t know the
exact breakdown between players and staff but
it’s clear that now we must stop calling fixtures
off. January 1 should have been the last date
allowed for cancellations.”Matthew Syed
Ainsley Maitland-Niles’s Roma have played 22 matches this season in Italy’s largely unaffected Serie AHow other big leagues in Europe are coping with the Covid crisis
‘Depleted’ Arsenal poised to trim squad days after postponement
Gary Jacob, Tom Roddy Marí is set to move to Udinese on loan.
The match against Tottenham
Hotspur was called off on Saturday
because Arsenal said they did not have
13 senior outfield players available, the
minimum required. Tottenham were
furious that the Premier League agreed
to their rivals’ request despite Arsenal
having only one Covid case at the time
— Martin Odegaard — though a
second player later tested positive.
Arsenal’s squad has been depleted by
injuries and call-ups to the Africa Cup
of Nations (Afcon) but the club still
agreed to loan Ainsley Maitland-Niles
to Roma and Folarin Balogun to
Middlesbrough last week. Granit
Xhaka would have been unable to play
on Sunday having been sent off in the
Carabao Cup semi-final away to Liver-
pool last Thursday.
Kolasinac, 28, will join Marseilles,while Marí, 28, who has featured three
times this season, was expected to have
a medical yesterday before joining
Udinese this week.
Arsenal are confident that the
second leg of their Carabao Cup semi-
final against Liverpool will go ahead
tomorrow night. They will be boosted
by the returns of Tyreece John-Jules
and Miguel Azeez from loan spells with
Blackpool and Portsmouth respective-ly. The midfielder Thomas Partey will
also be returning soon after Ghana
were knocked out of Afcon yesterday.
However, Arsenal’s latest transfer
moves are unlikely to impress Antonio
Conte, the Tottenham head coach. He
has accused the Premier League of
making a “mess” out of the way it han-
dled requests to call off matches.
6 TV: Arsenal v Liverpool, 7.45pm
tomorrow, Sky Sports Main Event
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