The Warm-Up: Borussia Dortmund get ready to unpause football
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Updated 14/05/2020 at 12:00 GMT
Germany braces for the weekend's big restart, and Italy sets a return date
Torjäger Erling Haaland schlug beim BVB ein wie eine Bombe
Image credit: Getty Images
THURSDAY’S BIG STORIES
Bundesliga says: two days to go!
We don’t quite know how you’d measure this, but we reckon this weekend’s round of Bundesliga fixtures could be the most intensely studied weekend of club football of all time. There won’t be any titles handed out, but this is more existential. Will it work? Will it feel really weird? And probably some actual football questions too.
Of course the biggest question is: what happens if there’s a clatter of positive tests? Already, Dynamo Dresden of the 2.Bundesliga have been forced back into isolation. But Borussia Dortmund’s managing director Carsten Cramer is feeling upbeat. Well, quite upbeat. A “positive test won’t be a catastrophe as long as we have the rules and recommendations for how to get along with it”. How terribly sensible.
You can follow five Bundesliga matches live with us across the first weekend, kicking off with Dortmund v Schalke at 14:30 on Saturday
Jens Lehmann, by contrast, is famously quite a silly man. He also isn’t part of the Dortmund hierarchy, which means his take on things doesn’t carry quite as much weight. And that’s perhaps for the best, since the former Arsenal goalkeeper and noted loose cannon is advocating a more rugged approach:
As long as the symptoms are not that bad, I think players have to cope with it. We have plenty of players who were actually infected, and most of them did not even show any symptoms. So I think for young, healthy, people with a strong immune system it’s not such a big concern.
Dortmund have the privilege of starting the whole thing up again, along with Schalke, in what must be the oddest Revierderby for some time. And we’re guessing Dortmund will be pretty popular among Bundesliga newcomers, thanks to the intoxicating promise of Erling Braut Haaland and Jadon Sancho up front. But really, for once, we’re all on the same team here. Team Hope Everybody’s Okay And Everything Works.
Serie A says: sì!
Elsewhere on the continent, plans are taking shape. The next of the big leagues to get going will likely be Italy: Serie A’s clubs yesterday agreed that they would restart the league on June 13, assuming all remains manageable on the virus front.
And assuming the government gives them the go ahead. But while we wait for that, full training in Italy resumes on Monday, albeit under strict guidelines that mandate a full 15 day quarantine in the evening of one positive test.
From an entirely selfish, football-centric, setting-the-plague-to-one-side perspective, Serie A is the most important of Europe’s big leagues to return, for the simple reason that it’s the tightest and most intriguing title race. Juventus lead Lazio by a single point, and if all goes to plan, in a month’s time we’ll find out whether or not momentum — one of football’s most treasured qualities — is a load of old nonsense.
You’d back Juventus, with their ludicrously deep squad and title-winning habit, to just pick up where they left off. That’s more or less the point of Juventus. But Lazio’s title challenge was a stranger and perhaps more delicate thing: a giddy unbeaten run stretching all the way back to late September. Win begetting win, spirits rising every week. The very picture of momentum …
… except they haven’t kicked a ball since the end of February. Now they’ve got a month to spin themselves back up to that extraordinary pace. If they do, then we can wave goodbye to “momentum” and enjoy the race. If they can’t, we’ll be left with another Juventus title, and a massive, unanswerable What If.
The Premier League says: er, hang on a second
And so to England, where even a date for a return is still a distant dream. According to the Guardian, a Premier League restart on June 12 is looking “less likely”, after a meeting between the league and the team captains produced “robust exchanges” and “diverging views”.
Turns out there aren’t any protocols for reintroducing full-contact training, and nobody’s worked out what’s going to happen if things get going again and somebody tests positive. Obviously these are extremely complicated and important questions and the answers cannot be rushed. But it’s sobering to confront just how far away the Premier League is from even a functional parody of normality.
Still, they’ve been given more time to get their homework done. Uefa have extended the deadline for presenting some kind of plan out beyond May 25:
Uefa would like as much as possible to receive such information by 25 May, but we understand that detailed plans might not be fully available by then due to a variety of external constraints. Uefa would nevertheless expect to at least receive some indications as to the potential way forward envisaged by national associations and leagues by that date.
We’re sure Uefa didn’t mean to sound like a tired schoolteacher there, but Uefa did nonetheless.
IN OTHER NEWS
Ping.
IN THE CHANNELS
Seems a decent sort, Trent Alexander-Arnold. Here is being grilled by Liverpool’s under-9s, in celebration of their new contracts. (Is it weird that under-9s have contracts? Do they sign them in felt tip?)
HAT TIP
Over on the Guardian, Samantha Lewis takes a look into the future — the possibly precarious future — of professional women’s sport after the lockdown ends.
Given its long history of silence and exclusion, women’s sport in particular has not had the same time or opportunities as men’s sport to manoeuvre itself into the culture of the communities that now form sport’s economic bedrock. But that does not mean it cannot reach the same heights over time.
COMING UP
Two. Days. To. Go.
Here to bring you Friday’s last flap of the advent calendar, Tom Adams
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