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pete

13 for 6 against 1 dissenter

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6 minutes ago, sonyc said:

Could this work in the favour of the bottom 3 or 6  therefore, that if this is true, matches are played out but likewise there is no relegation but a temporarily enlarged PL next year? I.e. the bottom 6 agree to the neutral venue idea in order to unlock the TV revenues and determine European places etc. Yet the one rule of no relegation is in place like the EFL. I know......I am clutching at straws.

This was the leaked plan in case the season can’t be finished and it goes points per game. I personally can’t see how the Championship can go with 27 clubs across what may be another problematic season. In other news Scotland have just announced an extension to the lockdown. Over to you Boris...

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If there is nothing to play for (i.e. Liverpool certs to win the League and no relegation) surely the vast majority of games become totally meaningless and as they will also be devoid of any atmosphere, who is going to bother watching them.

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With some very strange results as well that's for sure. Pre-season friendlies or testimonials in all but name. But it all helps to retain the integrity of the game. Say it enough and you begin to believe it. 

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5 minutes ago, Making Plans said:

If there is nothing to play for (i.e. Liverpool certs to win the League and no relegation) surely the vast majority of games become totally meaningless and as they will also be devoid of any atmosphere, who is going to bother watching them.

Make no mistake as soon as that lot have the title in the bag (i.e. after 2 or 3 games) then having been part of the group forcing a resumption they will be wrapping their stars up in cotton wool on safety grounds and playing their U23 team in the remaining games. Guaranteed. As will any other club that has nothing to play for. I know this happens for the last couple of games in most seasons but it will be greatly exaggerated due to the current circumstances. I guess this could either help or hinder us but it will make it something of a farce.

 

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Fact is, no matter what method or schemes are used to bring this season back to life, the landscape of the competition has fundamentally changed and as such any mentions of 'integrity of the game' are moot.

The situation is a mess and it's almost verging on bizarre parody the level of self-importance is coming out of the upper reaches of football in this country 

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Don't forget they are also proposing having shorter halves, i.e. not 45 minutes.  So you could have matches that last an hour (is a result even valid after an hour?), with players wearing masks.  Some teams playing their U23s and youth players against other teams playing their full strength sides with players back from injuries and loans and added to a squad that wouldn't have been available otherwise.  Games at 'neutral' venues but no doubt still favouring some more than others, players not fully fit, more injuries, players contracting the virus.  I could go on ...

A farce doesn't even come close.  I think it's safe to say that many PL records will fall, record scoreline, record victories etc etc.

They can honestly say that they can promote, relegate and maintain integrity on that basis???

Edited by norfolkbroadslim

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The whole thing is ridiculous - if you materially change the playing conditions it totally loses its ‘integrity’ yet that word is being so widely used to justify just about anything and everything.

IMO the worst part of it is that the government seems to want to use football as some sort of PR exercise - it could badly backfire on all concerned if players get ill.

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Rabbit in the Headlights Raab forewarned us that the EPL is coming back with that pathetic statement. Please convince me that the public who are 50-50 will bother watching. One look and it could be the worst turn off ever. No doubt SKY will present it as the greatest thing since TV was invented.

But it will be pathetic and sad.

And afterwards it will be crowned as the most exciting game ever. Well there is a thought say the moguls. Why bother with all these stands and bars and restaurants. Who needs supporters?

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My natural cynicism and the financial and legal situations surrounding football always made me understand that the season would be played to a finish - in whatever way is possible. Even if players fall ill, they will still play. They play when injured anyway.

It's a bit like the gladiators in Rome - the rulers had to give the mob something to control them; football has to give the TV companies something to survive. That the gladiators died is irrelevant; if footballers get ill, that's apparently also irrelevant because the clubs will have their money.

Moral sickness will always overcome integrity when money is involved. It always has and it always will. They can call it what they like.

Unfortunately, millions of people will tune in to watch this garbage when it is on Sky and BT. Especially as Love Island is cancelled.  Real life has become the Turner Show.

 

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38 minutes ago, Making Plans said:

If there is nothing to play for (i.e. Liverpool certs to win the League and no relegation) surely the vast majority of games become totally meaningless and as they will also be devoid of any atmosphere, who is going to bother watching them.

Not sure of their outstanding fixtures, if they get the points required quickly they won’t bother with the rest. If any of them are against the bottom six we’re knackered 

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56 minutes ago, norfolkbroadslim said:

Don't forget they are also proposing having shorter halves, i.e. not 45 minutes.  So you could have matches that last an hour (is a result even valid after an hour?), with players wearing masks.  Some teams playing their U23s and youth players against other teams playing their full strength sides with players back from injuries and loans and added to a squad that wouldn't have been available otherwise.  Games at 'neutral' venues but no doubt still favouring some more than others, players not fully fit, more injuries, players contracting the virus.  I could go on ...

A farce doesn't even come close.  I think it's safe to say that many PL records will fall, record scoreline, record victories etc etc.

They can honestly say that they can promote, relegate and maintain integrity on that basis???

The point about neutral venues favouring some more than others is a good one. Is it fair, for example, for us to play West Ham at the Emirates or Man City at Anfield? I assume the plan will be for clubs to be based at grounds that involve a minimum amount of travel so that's a possibility. However the reality is that every single game will be an away game for us involving a hotel stay whereas for other clubs their players may be able to stay at home, train on their usual training grounds etc. 

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41 minutes ago, CANARYKING said:

Not sure of their outstanding fixtures, if they get the points required quickly they won’t bother with the rest. If any of them are against the bottom six we’re knackered 

Of our rivals they only play Brighton and Villa. Brighton is their second game so probably not an issue. Villa is the third from last game. 

I suppose conceivably we will face Man City and possibly Chelsea with little left to play for.

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32 minutes ago, keelansgrandad said:

Rabbit in the Headlights Raab forewarned us that the EPL is coming back with that pathetic statement. Please convince me that the public who are 50-50 will bother watching. One look and it could be the worst turn off ever. No doubt SKY will present it as the greatest thing since TV was invented.

I think you're underestimating peoples boredom. 

People are starved for new, live content right now. I think people will tune in.

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Head of police now chipping in and saying clubs that don’t like the neutral venue plan should “get a grip” although the police are happy for championship clubs to play home and away.

 

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20 minutes ago, JF said:

Head of police now chipping in and saying clubs that don’t like the neutral venue plan should “get a grip” although the police are happy for championship clubs to play home and away.

 

Why is he commenting on this at all? Why are the championship proposing to play on their normal grounds then?

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4 minutes ago, Jim Smith said:

Why is he commenting on this at all? Why are the championship proposing to play on their normal grounds then?

I honestly don’t think there is an actual plan in place for the championship. I think everyone is getting strung along here and the only league that will start is the PL because of the need to finish for the money to filter down through the leagues. I believe the Championships only plan is to finish on PPG 

Edited by JF

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4 minutes ago, Jim Smith said:

Why is he commenting on this at all? Why are the championship proposing to play on their normal grounds then?

Although having listened to his comments he also addresses them to "those who have stressed the importance of picking up trophies" so in reality what he's saying is that football is not important in the grand scheme of things and not worth risking lives over

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28 minutes ago, JF said:

I honestly don’t think there is an actual plan in place for the championship. I think everyone is getting strung along here and the only league that will start is the PL because of the need to finish for the money to filter down through the leagues. I believe the Championships only plan is to finish on PPG 

I suspect that is true. The Championship will wait until the PL has voted for three clubs to be relegated, on the assumption that their replacements will have been genuinely promoted by also  having played  a full season. Then the Championship will announce the three will be decided by the current standings, or PPG, or perhaps with clubs 3-6 playing off.

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Quite a good interview today from the Villa CEO in the Times:#

“We’re nowhere near having found the formula to complete the season,” 

“I’m told how keen government are to get football back. I remain of the view that we’re going to complete this season and it’s a question of ‘when and how?’ not ‘if’.”

“Yes, of course I have to look after my club’s interests but there is a duty on 20 Premier League clubs to find a formulation that we know is nowhere near perfect but gets football back to complete the 19-20 season so that crucial issues at the top of the table can be resolved but that doesn’t ask people to agree to incredibly damaging changes for their own particular clubs. People have to see through that we need 20 clubs to be happy and that’s the statesmanship job that’s needed at the moment in the league.

“I don’t think neutral venues is by any means the only issue that needs to be resolved that goes to the heart of ‘is this still a competition everybody signed up to’.

“It’s about anything and everything to do with full-strength sides and squads. What happens with sick players, or players who are symptomatic, that ultimately means you’re weakening teams. There are a lot of teams mathematically capable of going down whose squads can’t survive three or four players failing ill, not being able to play. If Villa had to a play a match without [Jack] Grealish, [Tyrone] Mings and [John] McGinn the chances of winning that game reduce enormously.

“You can’t compare it to normal season when on January 1 Tom Heaton and Wesley, our goalkeeper and our star centre forward, ruptured their cruciate ligaments [away to Burnley]. That’s bad luck and that hurts teams like us and we take that on the chin. But we’re talking here about a known, global, devastating epidemic that is still at large. It’s obvious with 500 or so Premier League footballers that we’re going to have positive tests, that players are going to get sick and that’s going to have an impact on teams’ ability to field a full-strength team.

“I don’t know what the solution is. I’d obviously like a rule that says we don’t have to play if our best players had Covid. We’re trying to complete a league quite quickly to give our broadcasters a product they want to show but how does it really work if after two games everybody’s off? You tell me.”

“Even in the executive group in the Premier League shareholders group we haven’t even been shown yet what they call ‘return to play’ protocols. So I haven’t discussed it with my players at all. The sense I get around the players is, like society generally, you’ll have people absolutely desperate to get back to work and have the attitude of ‘I’ll take my chances’ and you’ll have players with particular circumstances where it won’t be practical or they won’t be comfortable. If I was a betting man I would say that the single biggest challenge we’ve got is to get those protocols signed off by everybody in football.”

“Although it all sounds extremely scientific, players being able to do physical conditioning work where they’re socially distanced in conditions that are completely sanitised and safe I think those are very doable. It’s a completely different ball game moving from socially distanced individual training to contact football and we haven’t had sight yet of those protocols.”

Concern for players’ welfare, clubs’ economic health and the debate about the nature of sporting integrity are inter-woven here. There is talk of some executives among the bottom six wanting no relegation, but doesn’t that send sporting integrity up in smoke? “I heard about that [the idea of no relegation] on Monday morning,”. “It’s an idea out there. It was billed to me as, ‘This is a way that cuts through all of the compromises that people will be asked to take.’ So it’s serious, it’s been thought through and it needs to be debated properly. There are lots of aspects on which 20 teams are going to need to compromise and some of those will be tough choices that, and these are your words not mine, ‘send sporting integrity up in smoke’.

“Ditto neutral grounds which obviously for a team that’s got six home games out of 10 left tilts the balance well away. Neutral grounds is a really serious issue for Aston Villa. I don’t think the Premier League in any way, shape or form wanted to entertain neutral grounds. It’s not coming from the Premier League. I think that’s coming from probably the police.”

The fear of relegation is compounded by the reality of falling into the financially stricken Championship. “I was astonished when I arrived 19 months ago in a League of which I had no prior experience to see how broken the financial model in the EFL was, particularly the Championship. League One and League Two clubs are all well run, they’re obviously now devastated by no fans in attendance as they are run on the basis where fan income is used to cover carefully controlled wages. But the Championship model has been broken long before Covid and I have real empathy for [new chairman] Rick Parry because he’s taken the job and out of nowhere a crisis has occurred, a devastating epidemic, which instantly brings to the fore the financial crisis the Championship already had.

“With the [wage] referrals we took at our club, the conversations I had with my players is, ‘We have to make Premier League clubs even stronger because without the Premier League there is no pyramid.’ We already essentially do fund English football whether it’s directly through solidarity or indirectly through our clubs loaning players, or buying players that keeps the pyramid self-funding. There’s an ecosystem in football but is completely dependent on the revenue-generating capability of the Premier League and that’s the way it should be.

“Do you think today three teams dropping down into a league that we were told yesterday is insolvent with £120 million [parachute money] is a good use of that money?” No. “So surely anyone could see that saving that money so it could be used to help fix the financial problems faced within the Premier League and elsewhere in football is quite an ingenious idea. Problems in the EFL long predate Covid. There are lots of people in that league who don’t think parachutes over in history have worked particularly well.’’

“I do take that particular link really seriously because I was campaigning for reform in the EFL last year because I felt the model was broken.”

“I’m very, very, very proud of my club but of every other club. It’s life-enhancing and moving to speak to all my colleagues at other clubs to be reminded that many of our clubs were created with a social purpose initially. I don’t know of any club that has ever lost sight of that.

“In the case of my own club it was an important message to players as if they would take really significant pay deferrals it would enable us to not only keep all of our much, much, much lower paid staff fully employed through this crisis but equally keep the club open for doing many of the works in the community which football clubs do.”

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Some excellent points, particularly about the trainwreck that is the Championship, and about the absurdity of players getting the virus being the same as getting injured. The problem with it being the Villa CEO is that it is widely believed they will be in serious financial trouble if they get relegated, and especially now, if the bottom does drop out of the transfer market and they don't get anything like what they need for, say, Grealish.

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That there was such a PR blitz from the top clubs while no vote taken strongly suggested there were more than six possible votes against.

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Well something is going to have to give or the summer will have so many legal battles going on that next season won’t start. This is the latest from F.A apparently 

 

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That is really underhand. We are being stitched up by the big clubs and their FA stooges. 

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Doesn’t change the position that we should sue if they did relegate us on the basis of an incomplete season though. 

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10 minutes ago, Jim Smith said:

That is really underhand. We are being stitched up by the big clubs and their FA stooges. 

We are bottom, if the season was played to conclusion we would probably still be bottom. I want us to stay up by any means too but talk of a stitch-up is for the birds. Villa have more of a case than we do.

Edited by BigFish

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1 minute ago, BigFish said:

Deleted duplicate

 

Edited by BigFish

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1 minute ago, BigFish said:

We are bottom, if the season was played to conclusion we would still be bottom. I want us to stay up by any means too but talk of a stitch-up is for the birds. Villa have more of a case than we do.

Oh for the gift if clairvoyance 😉

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