George Baldock can finally see light at the end of tunnel at Sheffield United

It has been a confusing few days in football’s battle against coronavirus. The sport will resume in Switzerland on June 8 if there is no worsening of the pandemic there and today the German government could allow the Bundesliga to start in little over a week. At the same time, France’s Ligue 1 and 2 have become the latest to give up the fight to resume the 2019-20 season.

While the chair of FIFA’s medical committee, Michel D’Hooghe, was urging football to abandon all plans to finish the campaign, and focus on starting the next one in September, former sports minister Richard Caborn was telling The Yorkshire Post it was the “duty” of politicians and administrators to return live sport to the country’s televisions as soon as it safely can.

This is a week heavy with meetings as various sporting bodies discuss with the Government and themselves if and how they can get up and running again. The Premier League’s meeting on Friday could be important.

Even before that, clubs were returning to their training grounds. Only for individual sessions under strict guidelines, but it was nevertheless significant. Sheffield United were one, and instantly Baldock could see life for him and his team-mates had changed. Fittingly, the path in front of him had become a lot less straight-forward.

“The last week or so they’ve ramped it up,” he says of his training, which until Tuesday was being done at home. “It’s really hard, pre-season basically. I thought the dreaded pre-season was over for the year but we’ll have to have another mini one again.

“We’ll run through brick walls to do any sort of training at Shirecliffe. It’s really good.”

It is not hard to detect the buoyancy in Baldock. He says he and his team-mates will make whatever sacrifices are needed to play again and when they do, they will be as fit as ever. Given it was one of the strengths which had the Blades seventh in the Premier League before matches went on hold, it is a daunting prospect for their rivals.

The wing-back has taken advantage of the lockdown to get into yoga, believing it could make him faster.

With the fitness work in the bank, now it is about using what Baldock refers to more than once as Shirecliffe’s “better surfaces” to work on the “football movements” his manager Chris Wilder mentioned the previous week.

“I’m hoping to get the balls out soon,” says Baldock. “Before it was long, lung-bursting runs whereas it’s still long running but there’s twists and turns around cones.

“We have timeslots so there’s no more than a person training at any time. They’ll normally be about 40-minute sessions, no rest, just full-on running.

“You get in at the timeslot you want and if you haven’t answered the group chat quickly enough you just get put in a slot! Everyone’s been really cooperative and as you would imagine buzzing to get in.

“It feels like a little bit of light at the end of the tunnel. We know it’s going to be different but to go back to Shirecliffe and see a few familiar faces, even from a distance, it’s nice.”

Not that he has wasted his lockdown.

“I’ve tried to pick a few people’s brains via phone calls and video calls and tried to learn stuff,” reveals Baldock. “Yoga especially, I’ve wanted to do it for months.

“It will hopefully help me recover from games a bit quicker. I’ve been doing it every day, 9am, with an instructor via Zoom, an hour-long session. I can actually see the benefits from it now, which is the best thing.

“Before we left I remember Nathan Winder (Sheffield United’s strength and conditioning coach) saying he believes I can get even quicker if my hips are looser or I’ve got a bigger knee lift. It’s all different physiological things I’ve been working on to get my body in better shape and if it helps the mind, brilliant. I definitely feel like after yoga I do all the chores quicker!

“I’m doing it with a guy from Sheffield. We had a long chat via Zoom. He just makes it specific for what my body needs – if I’ve got a tight back or he believes I’ve got tight hips. We just do a lot of work on twisting and different types of holds, core stability exercises. I’ll definitely carry it on.”

If this is phase two for the players, the wait now is to be told when phase three – group training – can return ahead of the ultimate goal of “project restart”, competitive football. The players are staying out of those discussions.

“I think we’ll leave a decision to powers that be to sort out games but anything that gets put in front of us, we’ll all be chomping at the bit to get back in,” says Baldock. “Any kind of rules that are put in place, I’m sure we’ll just get on with it and do our best to get the season done.”

It is impossible to know how far away the end of the tunnel actually is, but seeing Baldock chatting to journalists over Skype, it is obvious just glimpsing it has lifted spirits.

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