The Premier League have decided against a Christmas ‘circuit-breaker’ following a meeting between clubs on Monday to decide how best to deal with the current coronavirus crisis.
Representatives of every top-flight club held talks via Zoom to discuss the possibility of postponing a round of fixtures over the festive period in order to halt the spread of Covid-19 cases which has caused havoc and resulted in six matches being postponed at the weekend.
Some teams had suggested moving the games scheduled for December 28-30 to a later date, but, according to The Athletic, the majority of clubs felt that was a risky strategy and preferred to continue playing on.
Any postponement would have incurred an economic cost for the Premier League, while the fixture schedule is already rammed and would have created significant problems for teams who have already had several matches postponed.
Although clubs have agreed to continue, if they still have a significant number of Covid cases and cannot fulfil fixtures then individual matches will still be postponed on a case-by-case basis, as has already been happening.
Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp, who has four positive cases within his squad, seemed exasperated with the current situation after his side’s draw with Tottenham and feels the abundance of fixtures over Christmas is too great a strain on Covid-hit teams.
‘So we play now Wednesday [in the Carabao Cup], we play Sunday and Tuesday – that’s not possible! We don’t have the players,’ he told Sky Sports.
‘We need to think that it can happen that we probably have another case or two, so the players go into quarantine and then all of a sudden we can play one game but not the next game. So we have to think about that. We cannot just push it all through.
‘We have different opportunities, first and foremost take away the second leg of the Carabao Cup semi-final, just play once wherever you want to play it, I don’t care.
‘And 26th and 28th that’s really not possible. If we can play through I don’t know, maybe we wake up tomorrow morning and we have a lot of cases and we cannot play anyway. But we would prefer to play but we need then help with the fixtures.’
He added: ‘We cannot just carry on like usual and think let’s have a look at who can play and who cannot play. No, the teams that can play need to have help from the schedule.’
The Football Association, meanwhile, are set to alleviate the workload on players by scrapping replays for the third and fourth rounds of the FA Cup in the new year, but only if the current situation has not improved by then.
MORE : Jurgen Klopp disagrees with Thomas Frank’s call to postpone Premier League games amid Covid-19 outbreak
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