English football is determined to carry on playing despite rising positive tests

Since Christmas, the top-flight has ramped up its testing of players, coaches and other relevant staff from one round a week to two and the result has been 40 positives, 28 between December 28 and 31, and 12 for the first three days of 2021.

No previous round had produced more than 18 positives, itself an unwanted record.

Fulham’s festive games against Burnley and Tottenham Hotspur, and Manchester City’s match at Everton were postponed because of outbreaks of the virus. Until then, Newcastle United’s match against Aston Villa had been the only game to fall foul of Covid-19.

There has also been a spate of Football League call-offs, most notably in League One, and although Sheffield United’s match at Crystal Palace on Saturday did go ahead, infections were a contributing factor in them only being able to name six of the nine permitted substitutes.

But the Premier League have tried to put the numbers in context to argue the measures it has in place are effective. With so much money riding on their broadcast deals, they can ill afford to temporarily postpone the season, as they were forced to between March and June 2020 because of the first lockdown.

“With low positive tests across overwhelming majority of clubs, the league continues to have confidence in its Covid-19 protocols, fully backed by the Government, to enable fixtures to be played as scheduled,” said the Premier League.

A number of high-profile players were found to have breached those protocols on New Year’s Eve, but the league has not handed out any punishments.

The 40 positives came from 2,295 tests.

In contrast to the first lockdown, the Government again announced that elite sport would be given special permission to continue playing behind closed doors through the latest restrictions, announced on Monday night. That means all men’s football down to Conference North/South level, and the top two tiers of the women’s game, which actually saw its positive results drop from 32 to 15 in the latest weekly round of testing.

Northern Premier League Marine have also been granted an exemption allowing them to host Tottenham Hotspur in this weekend’s FA Cup third round tie.

The Football League also intends to continue as normal, though it has not made any public statement on the matter.

Its latest round of testing could cause a nervous wait for the Football Association, with results expected on tomorrow or on Friday. The FA Cup third round, one of the highlights of the footballing calendar, starts on Friday with two all-Premier League ties, but there must be fears of postponements.

The latest rounds of tests are one of the few mandatory ones at Football League level ahead of an expected toughening of it regimes. The League, which tightened its protocols at the end of last year, is understood to be finalising plans for all players and staff to now be tested twice a week having previously only had to do so at the start of pre-season, of the season and in the case of Championship clubs and individual international players at League One and Two level, the international breaks. These tests, unlike those in the Premier League, were paid for by the clubs.

The latest round of results will also decide whether Sheffield Wednesday reopen their Middlewood Road training ground. Players have been training at home since an unspecified number of positives were returned at the start of the week.

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