LOMAS ON MANSFIELD TOWN: Season 2019/20 could already be over as virus bites hard

The world that we know has suddenly become very surreal as the coronavirus sees a disaster movie nightmare slowly becoming a reality before our eyes.
Football has been devastated by coronavirus.Football has been devastated by coronavirus.
Football has been devastated by coronavirus.

These are unprecedented times in my lifetime and events not seen since the Second World War with talk of rationing as panic-buyers clear the shelves of toilet paper, pasta and baked beans.

With people starting to die in the UK and infection rates rapidly doubling, it was suddenly inevitable that football would stop with all public gatherings likely to follow suit.

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Many of us, since we were kids, have lived life based around the domestic football season, watching with interest what happened in all the divisions and trying to arrange other things around when games were being played.

But suddenly its all gone in the blink of an eye and it's left a very empty feeling.

Other sports are following suit and TV sports channels and newspaper sports sections are starved of action.

But, with lives at stake, it is very much the right decision to halt everything as, contrary to Bill Shankley's famous statement, football is not more important than life and death.

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This situation is going to get far worse before it gets better and we simply have to dig deep as a nation and get through it, looking after ourselves but making sure we look after others too.

My very best wishes go out to young Stag Alistair Smith who is self-isolating after collapsing with a high fever. He won't be the last.

Our next big football season update is expected on 4th April but, to me, it seems impossible we can now complete 2019/20.

There seems little chance the virus will have peaked by then and with players succumbing to it, needing 7-14 days away in isolation and then needing the same time again to regain some level of fitness, by the time they are ready to play, other key team mates may be going down with it.

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Once we get into May we will see players – and managers – at the end of their contracts, loan spells over and teams still missing ill players.

If promotions/relegations are awarded as it currently stands then we would face a series of legal challenges from sides narrowly missing out going into next season.

And by the time we do manage to kick off a 2020/21 season, and there is no guarantee of that, we may have lost some clubs who are already on the financial brink and, starved of gate money, simply cease to exist by then.

For once, this is the time that the big boys in the Premier League should show some real solidarity with the minnows below them and offer some financial help.

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The amounts of money sloshing round at the top in the modern day game are simply obscene and a lot of people would feel a whole lot different if these clubs could prove they have a heart and make an effort to help preserve the game as we know it in the smaller cities and towns – to steal a political catchphrase, for the many and not the few.

The only silver lining is that many Stags fans could not wait for the end of a miserable season and now look to have had that wish granted – albeit in the worst possible way.

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