You might be surprised that at this stage of the season I actually didn’t venture out to a game on Tuesday evening. Plenty of good reason though, Monday was spent all day at The Hive for a sponsors day with my good friends Nick and Lee, beers, some food and great company from the Barnet management team.
The Bees were home to Bromley the following evening, but with the school holidays in full flow and a week with the kids the financial cost was outweighed along with the fact that there are a likely good set of play off fixtures to take in before May arrives.
I did however take the stream option, unaware that it also gives me access to games on Thursday evening as well which is a nice bonus. But I won’t be taking you through the journey of that stream, whilst they were playing in Harrow we had more contentious postponements happening which is where the focus for this blog is.
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It’s crazy to think that here we are in almost mid-April and we’re still having to pander to the rain and waterlogged pitches. It’s been one of the roughest three months in football for weather related problems, if not the worst this side of 2000.
There isn’t much that comes close to the frustration many of us have encountered since January. You can’t control the forecast, but there are factors that can be controlled to a degree.
Front loading fixtures to the better months is the simplest form of overcoming the congestion we’ve experienced this season. The season began for most the last weekend of July and the first weekend of August, the latter for the National League. Two blank midweek’s in the first month of the season beggars belief, the point where the players are getting themselves up to match speed.
Two more blank midweeks followed in September, here we are in April with Gateshead facing five games in the space of nine days thanks to the weather and cup runs, FC Halifax with four in the same amount of time.
It’s inevitable that sides in the top division will go deep into the FA Trophy, they don’t enter it until just before Xmas so why aren’t they frontloaded to reflect that?
October again had two blank midweeks as well, but throw a set of matchday fixtures of an evening into November and January which the weather should be at it’s worst, the latter unsurprisingly didn’t see all 12 fixtures take place.
I’m not going to concentrate on just the top division, it’s been a car crash all the way through the pyramid. The same applies every year that clubs underneath the National League enter the cups earlier, replays have been taken away for the most part so why aren’t a round of fixtures scheduled for the midweek after to counter that cup Saturday?
I won’t tar every league with the same brush, some have been very pro-active in doing so, and if you do then you cover your own. Is it time for league cup competitions to fall by the way side?
I don’t think it is, but I think these competitions should be pushed to the new year of every season, if it’s these getting postponed instead of vital league games then so be it, shunt them in to the very latter weeks or if the weather dictates the competition becomes null and void.
The County Cups take the criticism too. I think there is still a place for them, it’s prestigious for clubs to win it. But move with the times and put the early first two rounds into the last week of pre-season, make it competitive as a proper tune up for the new campaign.
While the pyramid is lovely to be even in numbers for the majority, are we asking too much for Step 5 and 6 to play 38 league games plus their cup games minimum of one round, numbers not far short of those full time players in the National League? Is that also contributing to the fixture pile up’s?
Do we need 20 team divisions at that level? 18 surely should be the maximum? As you rise up you should expect to play more games and increased travelling, that is the right way to do it in my opinion.
At Step 5 there is one division this year with 24 teams in it, you can guess what issues they’re struggling with, can we expect an apology from the FA for overloading?
It’s the pressure it puts on everyone involved, players, management teams, supporters and most of all the volunteers who keep this great game of ours ticking along week to week, year to year.
Have they ever stopped to think about the damage it does for all those in some shape or form? Because from the outside looking in, the answer is no.
Do the FA and the leagues need to take some collective responsibility? Absolutely they do, I read a few weeks ago that FA committee’s did encourage front loading, very few listened then it seems if that’s true.
Failure will be not to take on board the feedback of how this season has panned out and take steps to counter some of it happening again. As noted the powers that be can’t control the weather but they can do much more to alleviate the pressure in simple steps, let’s not be having this same conversation next season.
