Hull City call for ‘relaxing’ of rules over Covid-19 postponements

Despite 14 Tigers players testing positive for coronavirus on Friday, Monday’s game was only called off at 1pm, and a decision on tomorrow’s at Sheffield United is expected today, according to South Yorkshire Police.

Harrogate Town, Doncaster Rovers and Bradford City were also due to play tomorrow, but the Sulphurites’ match with Mansfield Town was called off yesterday, the other two at Cambridge United and Walsall respectively on December 23.

Like the Premier League, the Football League is determined to play as many games as possible during this Covid-19 spike to minimise disruption to the fixture list and television schedules but that maximises the chances of late call-offs leaving supporters inconvenienced and in many cases out of pocket.

Yesterday the Premier League announced a record 103 positive tests for players and staff in the week up to Boxing Day which led to the postponement of 15 matches, including both Leeds United’s post-Christmas fixtures.

Having taken 2,500 supporters to East Yorkshire, Blackburn are understandably angry at the lateness of Monday’s decision but Hull vice-chairman Ehab Allam says the problem lies with the protocols they followed.

“We could see the squad was being thinned out to a point where we knew it was on the cusp of potentially having to cancel the game,” said Allam, whose head coach Grant McCann contracted the virus on Wednesday.

“We spoke to the league on Friday and said, ‘Look, we’re at 14 cases this week already, the game is at risk and obviously we’ll still comply with all of the rules and we’ll try to put the game on but we’re just giving you a head’s up that we may not be able to.’

“We did an extra test (on Christmas Day) to try and mitigate the risk which the players conducted themselves at home on Christmas Day and a further test (on Boxing Day) which was before the match in accordance with the rules.

“We were notified as soon as we got the last results, so as soon as we knew we communicated with the league and relevant parties. We had a five-minute discussion between ourselves and then informed the relevant parties.”

Hull say they told the league at noon, yet they were only informed they could postpone minutes before the 1pm announcement. On Thursday, assistant manager Cliff Byrne had said that as things stood he was confident the game would go ahead.

The game was due to be shown live on television after the previous choice had been postponed.

“We certainly don’t want to be breaching any rules because that may impact the games going forward, we have to be very mindful of that,” said Allam.

“The league are in a difficult position trying to come up with rules which the Government would find acceptable.

“When you’re having to test every day and in some cases to mitigate the risk by increasing the testing to twice a day, then with the rules in place, we’re almost looking for a problem.

“The rules are too tight, I think they should be relaxed a little bit, but I have to comply with them.”

Mansfield called off their trip to Harrogate because four players tested positive and others were showing signs of symptoms. It was a decision Harrogate manager Simon Weaver was braced for.

“Reading between the lines of (Stags manager) Nigel (Clough)’s quotes after the Hartlepool game (on Boxing Day), it looked as if this might end up being the case, so it comes as no surprise,” he said.

“We’d have turned up with 13 fit outfield players the same as we did last week and just got on with it. I think they (Mansfield) are saying they would only have 10 available, so if that’s the case then obviously they can’t play.”

Every Football League postponement is investigated at the expense of the club who call it off but whereas games can only be called off because of the number of players testing positive for Covid-19, the threshold is the number of players available, which is affected by other factors.

Leeds were forced to play Arsenal on the Saturday before Christmas despite being more depleted than many of those who did call games off because they have a small squad which was hit by eight injuries, a suspension and one Covid case. When the latter number went up, matches against Liverpool and Aston Villa were postponed.