The Second Apocalypse

Many of us hoped it would never come but here is it. The second apocalypse has arrived, buckle in folks.

The first signs of Apocalypse came on the Sunday the 12th when Tottenham’s game away at Brighton was called off due to an outbreak of it-that-must-not-be-named in the visitor’s squad. This was a bad sign sure, but it was only going to be a one-off right?

Wrong. Very Wrong. We are now 7 days down the line from that and there has only been a single day without a cancelled game in at least one of the top 4 leagues of English football in both the Men’s and Women’s games.

The games that have been cancelled this week are:
Monday 13th December – Sheffield United vs QPR (Championship)
Tuesday 14th December – Brentford vs Manchester United (Premier League)
Wednesday 15th December – Burnley vs Watford (Premier League)
Leicester City vs Manchester City (Women’s League Cup)
Thursday 16th December – Leicester City vs Tottenham Hotspur (Premier League)
Friday 17th December -NONE

That was the week days and the constant cancellations every day, particularly on Monday when there was only 1 game to look at, was becoming worrying for football fans across the country. It has also become infuriating that some of those games were cancelled at extremely late notice. For that point I’m thinking mostly of the Burnley vs Watford game on Wednesday which was cancelled a mere 2 hours before kick off. Whilst this will absolutely be enough notice for the home fans who will mostly live locally, it certainly was far too short notice for the Watford fans whose journey up to Lancashire from Hertfordshire absolutely takes more than 2 hours and will have been on their way up north when they got the news.

These late cancellations do nothing to prevent the national spread of the global it and all they cancellations 2 hours before the game will do is ruin the days of a thousands of people on their journey to the greatest escape from reality in human history.

If that escape from the trudge of everyday is to be taken away from people the least they deserve is to be told the evening beforehand. That way they can at least find another use for the day and not potentially spread the thing hundreds of miles on their journeys around the country.

Friday may have looked like a break from the apocalypse but it was actually the day it hit in full force. This was the day when the Saturday games for December 18th began to be cancelled in droves and football fans across the nation realised the second apocalypse had truly come. There were originally 40 games scheduled for Saturday 18th December across the top 4 leagues of the Men’s game in England and Friday was the game many of them died.

When the damage of the first wave was inspected only 16 games were able to go ahead as planned, 24 had been cancelled. This was only a 40% success rate for games on Saturday and that is not good for anyone. The amount of fans that had to change their plans due to this is astronomical, but most of us can admit that cancelling the games was absolutely the right option. The last thing most fans want is a full lockdown where no games happen at all, but in the meantime as many games that can go on should.

The second wave of the apocalypse that hit on Sunday did a little better in terms of the percent of games that went ahead at 46.66%, sure there were only 15 games originally scheduled for today but 7 of them went ahead so it’s still slightly ahead of the first wave. The Women’s game was hardest hit in the second wave. Only 25% of the EPL games on this day were cancelled, whilst the WSL saw a 50% cancellation rate and in the Women’s Championship just one of the 6 games survived.

Over the first 2 waves of the second apocalypse only 23 of the originally planned 55 games went ahead, a success rate of just 41.8%. This low success rate over the weekend is disappointing for those of us who enjoy going to games and with some of the clubs who did go ahead requesting their games be cancelled too due to outbreaks in their squads, this rate is only going to decrease over the winter if nothing is done about it.

To this end the clubs of the 20 clubs of the Premier League are meeting at 1pm on Monday to discuss the way forward. Managers and Captains of the clubs are also going to have their own meeting at the same time to run through the options they would be happy with. I know that Thomas Frank of Brentford wanted to see this weekend’s games and the midweek League Cup Quarter Finals all cancelled to give clubs a chance to bring their outbreaks under control. It would mean every game that I had originally planned to go to before Christmas will have been cancelled, but if it’s the best way to ensure that we don’t have a full cancellation of all football later this winter then I say go for it.

No-one wants to see games that they have been wanting to go to for months or years in the case of the top teams, where getting tickets can be near impossible due to demand, and the newly promoted teams whose fans don’t know if they will have the chance to play the teams they’ve always dreamed of playing next season, cancelled. If it helps prevent another wave of deaths from the virus though then I am willing to cope with it.

Despite this second apocalypse though I was still able to make one of the games that did go ahead in the WSL today and the blog for that match experience will be up in the next few days.