Over the past two weeks, Tottenham Hotspur has seen their fixtures postponed as the squad has a COVID-19 outbreak. As a result, Spurs have seen their matchups against Stade Rennais, Brighton & Hove Albion, and Leicester City.
However, Tottenham isn’t alone in trying to contain the outbreak running through their facilities, leading to multiple positive tests. Brentford is one of the other clubs dealing with their COVID-19 issues.
As a result, manager Thomas Frank believes that this weekend’s Premier League fixtures should be postponed to save the remaining set of festive fixtures as it allows them to clean things up and maneuver their squad.
“We think we should postpone the full round of Premier League games this weekend,” Frank said, with Sky Sports relaying his comments. “Covid cases are going through the roof at all Premier League clubs; everyone is dealing with it and having problems.”
“To postpone this round and also the Carabao Cup round would give everyone a week at least, or four or five days to clean and do everything at the training ground, so everything is clean and you break the chain.”
Frank believes that these days will allow for the Festive fixtures to remain on schedule as he doesn’t want any interruptions ahead of the Boxing Day and New Years Day matchups.
“We fully respect that we want to play, and it is important football keeps going, and this way we can make sure Boxing Day keeps going. I’m 100 percent sure of that,” added Frank.
“This Omicron variant is running like wildfire around the world, and I think we need to do all we can to protect and avoid it. I think we can do a lot by closing down training grounds for three, four, or five days, and then we can go again.”
It doesn’t seem as though the league will go down that route, but they have made a habit of postponing matches a couple of hours before kick-off. Hence, there’s no way of telling what this weekend will look like as some teams continue containing the number of cases on their squad that prevent them from fielding a competitive team.
He’s got a fair point, because everything is descending into chaos because of a lack of a clear direction on this. If they took the view that if the players are fit enough to play even a positive test or not that they should, then that would be one way through it.
However this ad hoc approach of trying to manage the spread of something that you can’t really manage the spread of, unless you completely lockdown solid, means that clubs need a bit of time and space in theie schedule to work out how they’re going to organise things.
Because he s “ONLY” manager of Brentford his sensible surgestion will be ignored