Tottenham Hotspur had their Sunday matchup against Arsenal postponed as the Premier League accepted The Gunners’ request to reschedule the match.
The north London rivals cited having many players presently unavailable across our team due to Covid, injuries, and players away with their countries at the African Cup of Nations.
However, Sky Sports pundit Gary Neville ripped the league for accepting Arsenal’s request stating that clubs are using this as a loophole if they don’t have their best squad for an upcoming matchup.
“Game off. What started out as postponements due to a pandemic has now become about clubs not having their best team,” Neville said on Twitter. “The Premier League must stop this now, draw a line in the sand and say all games go ahead unless you have an exceptional amount of cases. It’s wrong.”
Spurs weren’t too happy either with the decision to not have the North London Derby go as planned. In a statement, Tottenham was surprised to learn that the Premier League granted this request.
The north London club also cited their elimination from the UEFA Conference League due to the league not wanting to reschedule their match against Leicester City. As a result, they had to forfeit as they couldn’t find a window to reschedule their game by the end of 2021.
“We are extremely surprised that this application has been approved,” the Spurs statement said. “We ourselves were disqualified from the European Conference League after a significant number of COVID cases meant we needed to reschedule a fixture, and our application to move our Leicester fixture was not approved – only for it to be subsequently postponed when Leicester applied.”