Week 25: The Wee Advantage Of A Hundred Day Break

What a difference a hundred-odd days make.

The majority of people in the UK (if recent survey findings are extrapolated) don’t want to return to the way things were before the coronavirus lockdown. They’ve grown used to the inevitable changes it’s forced people to take and even began to quite like them.

Be it improved pollution levels, working from home, less air travel, more staycations, long hair, getting paid to stay at home or whatever else they’ve become accustomed to, one of the positive consequences of an enforced change is that it changes attitudes as well as behaviours.

I know that’s the case with me. My shopping habits have altered completely for instance, helped largely by some brands morally distancing themselves from me and forcing me to seek alternatives that I’ve found are not only much cheaper but don’t compromise on quality. Some other things (family time, exercise and eating habits) have improved considerably while other – expensive – ‘habits’ (coffee consumption, driving long distances and haircuts, to name three) have reduced unimaginably.

But, like the furlough scheme, things have to come to an end. We have to resume normal – or as close to normal – life again sometime. It doesn’t mean that things have to all go back the way they were – although quite a few will eventually – but rather that we can choose to revert to what we once knew, or continue with the new ways after a kind of life reset, if you like.

Football, of course, never really had that option.

It had to restart as close to where it left off as possible. Sure, there are enforced changes but they are on health and safety grounds. The rest of the restart was just that and not a reset, because fixtures, points gained and to be awarded, venues and the laws of the game don’t get to change that much (unless we count five substitutes and drinks breaks; both technically still for health and safety).

It has to be this way to make it a level playing field for everyone.

The integrity of the competitions were already in question when neutral venues were favoured at the start of the Project Restart talks but later abandoned. If you played home and away for thirty-odd games, how can it be fair to finish on a different basis to that?

You could make a similar argument about fans. We started with them, so was it fair to finish without them? Think it’s the same for everyone? But what if, for example, at the start of the season, you might have played a close (in league terms) opponent away in front of a fiercely partisan crowd and lost, but in the return fixture, it might be your stadium but it’s empty and without any of those advantages the other team enjoyed.

Going even deeper than that, some clubs don’t even have the same players. Take Charlton Athletic, for instance, where three players who played the whole season to March – including leading scorer, Lyle Taylor – chose not to play after the restart in case it jeopardised their futures.

So even a restart can be uneven, although the issues are unavoidable, in places.

What has surprised me most about it though has been the different attitudes of returning teams, outside of the Premier League anyway.

I was initially alerted when I listened to a couple of interviews with managers of Championship teams. One in particular, with Charlton’s Lee Bowyer, sounded like someone who was literally champing at the bit to get his players back on the field, albeit with the aforementioned contractual issues in the background. He sounded focused and hungry, and I assumed his players would, therefore, be the same.

Contrast this with the noises I heard coming out of Queens Park Rangers, Hull City and to a degree, Stoke City, as well. They spoke of their dissatisfaction with coming back, citing they hadn’t had enough time to prepare. It sounded like their seasons were going down the toilet. Between the lines, this smacked of getting excuses in early but it also sent out a motivational signal to their opponents – I assume unintentionally – that suggested ‘we aren’t quite as up for this as we might be’.

The results after lockdown…

QPR 0 Barnsley 1

Hull City 0 Charlton 1

Charlton 1 QPR 0

Stoke 0 Middlesbrough 2

QPR 1 Fulham 2

Wigan 3 Stoke 0

Coincidence? Perhaps but I don’t think so. Even if the players and management (Stoke had more of an excuse as Michael O’Neill was self-isolating) were 100% ready, having others at the club saying you aren’t can be debilitating; even if it just gets into the players’ heads.

Take another club who hit the ground running when we got going again, Wigan. The nine points they’ve already accumulated in their three games might come in useful given they will be deducted more than that for going into administration, but on the field, they’ve been right at it while others have dilly-dallied. No wonder there have already been a lot of expressions of interest to buy the club, they are one of the form teams right now.

Yet all the Championship teams had access to the same information and would have known the likely dates for restarting the fixtures, so in that sense, it was a level field.  But it was always one of those situations where some canny teams could use the break to their advantage – similar to the way a losing tennis player goes for a piss and then comes back and turns the game around after the momentum has been halted – when the season restarted.

Barnsley and Luton have also quickly made up ground on those above them in a similar way. They have had all lockdown to think about it and prepare for a winner-takes-all mini-season so it’s hardly surprising they’ve used it well.

There is also that element of ‘what have we got to lose?’ that comes into it, meaning they leave everything out on the grass.

That could also apply to Northampton Town (congratulations btw) who found themselves in that situation more than any other team. They didn’t have a mini-season but just two (or three if they were lucky) games after the restart to define the season.

They’d been that losing tennis player before the lockdown, a defeat at home to lowly Mansfield in their final game before the postponements, followed losses away to Cheltenham and Walsall (the last of four successive defeats in league and cups) in a run that included defeats at home to Swindon and Port Vale. They scraped into the top seven by a point with nine (un-played)  games remaining and continued that form in their play-off first-leg when Cheltenham won 2-0 at the Sixfields Stadium.

That enabled them to just go for it, winning the return leg in Cheltenham and the final at an empty Wembley by an aggregate of 7-0 when they beat Exeter who leaked four goals.

But not all teams can turn it around so quickly. Exeter had not only remained similar to their form before lockdown (losing at Walsall – how did we end up in mid-table? – in March and two 1-1 draws before that) but also their form in playoff finals full stop, having lost their third in four seasons.

But of course, the previous defeats were markedly different to last weeks. The 2018 one, against Coventry, was played in front of more than 50,000 people. This time it was a few commentators and reporters from the various broadcasters, and a guy with a bottle of ball sanitiser.

Which got me to wondering. Is a shattering defeat better or worse when it’s behind closed doors? Of course, the fans can’t pretend it never happened but does it soften the blow – for players and fans alike – if no-one is there to see it?

Like the question of whether a tree in the forest makes a noise if no-one is there to hear it fall, does a heavy defeat at Wembley seem less heavy against a sea of bright red seats?

I’d imagine – with admittedly zero point of reference – that it still probably hurts like hell.

But at least you don’t have to walk down Wembley Way afterwards with rival fans really taking the piss.

words Darren Young, D3D4 columnist