Nobody is pretending it’s the biggest thing in the country right now, but this is a football website and football is being quite significantly impacted by the historic events of the last week.
An already absurd World Cup-ruined fixture list is having more and more complications thrown at it and not many solutions spring easily to mind.
Here are five possible outcomes, solutions, problems and puzzles to it all – especially if further games are called off…
Title-deciding double-header?
The first and most obvious response to the cancellation of last weekend’s games was to point out it was a mistake. The second, not unrelated, response was to wonder when precisely these 10 games are going to be squeezed into a schedule already fuller than a post Liverpool v Man United Mailbox thanks to that pesky winter World Cup.
Clearly, the greatest problems arise for those teams in Europe, for whom empty midweeks are now an extreme rarity. There seems to be almost no prospect for those teams of last weekend’s games being played before the World Cup. January is pretty packed too, but there is one specifically tantalising possibility that arises. The midweek after the weekend of February 4-5 is the one before the resumption of European competition and is currently blank.
Assuming at least one of Manchester City or Tottenham has made it through to round five of the Carabao and European knockouts of some description – and you’ll forgive the huge presumptive leap of us describing this scenario as Quite Likely – that midweek might be the best or even only fit for the game postponed at the Etihad on Saturday.
And what makes this so enticing? The fact Spurs host Manchester City at White Hart Lane on the weekend of February 4-5, setting up a potentially vital double-header between what could even at that stage be two title contenders but will surely at the very, very least be between one title contender and a team that has for some reason bothered them more than just about any other in recent years.
Replays schmeplays
One other obvious solution would be to continue further down an increasingly-established road and completely bin off FA Cup replays altogether. The wider arguments against this are well known and all extremely valid, but if we’re going to have matches from at least one and very likely two weekends to fit in somewhere else then the most obvious slack that could be returned to the schedule would be the two January midweeks currently earmarked…
Click Here to Read the Full Original Article at Football365…