COVID-19: THE LATEST FROM SOLIHULL & THOUGHTS ABOUT SOCCER...

COVID-19: THE LATEST FROM SOLIHULL & Thoughts About Soccer…

He doesn’t appear to very likeable. He is squat and clearly unfriendly as he shuffles, scraping soft footwear on the road surface, to his local shop directly opposite his home. He parks his car on his drive sometimes, yet on other occasions he leaves it round the corner on the road. He smokes.

Hence it was strange to spot him leaving One Stop on the Stratford Road on Saturday morning with his purchased fags. Was he simply giving his car a run? Or has he been banned from his local shop? I bought milk and left the store, then I spotted him standing smoking next to his vehicle… Odd, really. Yeah, I guess he’s unlikeable and unfriendly…

So, on Friday, the previous day we drove to Alcester, close enough to enable a return if the loo was needed, as public toilets are of course closed at present. Parking in Oversley Green, next to where Alcester Town FC used to play, a field which I believe might have Roman remains some way below the surface, we then walked along the riverbank for a while amongst huge numbers of buttercups which painted much of the ground bright yellow. We spotted swifts, swallows and a crow seeing off a buzzard, which twisted and flipped aerially, as the crow flew at it. The crow behaved like a particularly evil bugger on the dodgems at a fairground…

The town was fine to walk through too, but one wonders whether some of the smaller shops will ever re-open… Food stores were doing some business, as shoppers, some in masks, waited patiently outside.

My blog started as a non-league football offering which of course has diversified over the years but although I miss football, reporting on games, taking images and filming clips too, the situation with professional soccer is getting more and more irritating. 

Fans will quite rightly miss any restart of the season and those folks who have paid for season tickets, or even those who generally choose individual matches to attend seem to have been disregarded completely. Maybe it’s the clubs’ fear of losing sponsorship and TV money which has annoyingly kept ‘the restart’ in the public eye for so many weeks. 

Clearly players need their money too, so performing for TV cameras in empty stadia seems likely but if I were a lifelong Liverpool season-ticket holder, I would be horrified not to be able to witness the clinching of a rare league title at first-hand, rather than on a television screen.

Players have apparently been turning up for training separately, working in distanced pairs sometimes and then returning home for showers. Changing into their kit for matches, players would be distanced from team-mates, before not shaking hands with opponents before games begin. Then during matches, the holding, the marking, the pulling, the challenges, the sweat, the runny noses, the coughs, the clearing of throats and the likely spitting onto the turf would all combine to make safety concerns fly in the wind… 

Players being tested for the virus more than once during the ensuing weeks if the season resumes in England seems wrong somehow for some ‘front-line’ workers are still struggling to get tested, yet amazingly, footballers will get tested as the norm… Football should not be a ‘special case’, surely…

In Germany, the use of five substitutes in matches from now on also seems odd, for some games earlier in the season would surely have had different outcomes, had five replacements been allowed then…

Thus, with all of the above considered, a team like West Ham or Brighton, even Villa, would not be comfortable with relegation being handed to them, especially if games are played in neutral arenas. A football crowd is known to inspire players when their team is in adversity, so even if matches are played on their own grounds, that special support and impetus would be lacking. 

Common sense really should be the way to go…   

So, during the Dortmund v Schalke game on Saturday, Steve McManaman decided that Schalke were a “…tiny bit one-dimensional…” Is that right?

And two-goal Guerrero was spotted spitting as he left the field at the end…

Bayern’s Thiago (why did Barcelona not attempt to buy the languid but intuitive and visionary midfielder back?) lit up my Sunday afternoon after returning from Yarningale Common, where buzzards soared and fields and stiles were a joy to encounter…

And then I returned to my car, where a woman of years sat on the Common’s rough grass just fifty centimetres from the rear fender of my vehicle. She was positioned between her friend’s car and mine, yet despite the fact that I had to reverse off the verge, she remained there, fumes and all… 

Life, eh?

A WOODPECKER CHECKS OUT THE FINCH-DISTANCING ON THE GARDEN FEEDERS...

The Mowdog…