Match postponed

TOP-LEVEL football in the UK will not return until 30 April at the earliest as the coronavirus pandemic continued to cause carnage to the sporting calendar this week.

All games in the Premier League and the Football League, and all fixtures in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, are currently postponed.

However, at the same meeting on Thursday, the Football Association agreed that the current season can be "extended indefinitely".

Liverpool fans - having seen their team build up a 25-point advantage in their search for a first league title for 30 years - can rest a little easier perhaps.

Earlier, on Tuesday, Euro 2020 was postponed by UEFA until the summer of 2021.

UEFA President Aleksander Čeferin announced the delay of exactly 12 months to avoid "placing any unnecessary pressure on national public services" in its 12 host countries.

Sensibly, the postponement will also provide a chance for European leagues that have been suspended to be completed when action eventually resumes.

For now, though, it is unclear when exactly that will be.

Only last week, the Premier League and the Football League suspended their respective programmes of fixtures until 4 April, after confirmed positive results for Arsenal manager Mikel Arteta and Chelsea midfielder Callum Hudson-Odoi.

But the exponential increase in cases in the UK has already caused this further four-week delay to the resumption of the action.

The latest figures released by the Department of Health and Social Care show there have now been 3,983 positive cases of COVID-19 in the UK and 177 deaths from the virus.

Meanwhile, in terms of the numbers on a worldwide basis, there have been over 11,000 deaths from more than 270,000 positive cases.

In terms of declared fatalities, Italy - with 4,032 deaths - has now overtaken China (3,248 deaths), the place from which the strain is thought to have originated.

Back here in the UK, Prime Minister Boris Johnson held a press conference on Monday in which he advised that everyone in the UK should avoid "non-essential" travel and contact with others.

Mass gatherings in places such as bars, restaurants, theatres and sports arenas should be avoided, he added - and, yesterday, these venues were ordered to close their doors completely.

Of course, much of the sporting world had already taken matters into their own hands - and the presence of the Italians in the Six Nations meant it was unavoidably among the first competitions to be affected.

At first, only matches involving the Azzurri against Ireland on 7 March and England on 14 March were postponed - but eventually all three of the games in the final round fell victim to the virus.

Elsewhere, the England cricket tour of Sri Lanka was abruptly ended midway through a warm-up match with captain Joe Root admitting to "an element of relief" that the decision had been made to bring the squad back home.

In the meantime, the season in Formula One has not yet even got off the start line.

The Chinese Grand Prix was postponed as far back as February - but it took until the very eve of the season opener in Australia for the race at Albert Park in Melbourne to be called off.

Even then, it was only hastily announced by motorsport governing body the FIA after McLaren had withdrawn from the Grand Prix following the return of a positive result for a team member's coronavirus test.

Delays to the races in Bahrain and Vietnam were also confirmed last week.

However, just this week, the Dutch and Spanish Grand Prix have also now been postponed - and the blue-ribbon event in Monaco has been cancelled completely.

Nevertheless, an already-congested calendar could still be bursting at the seams when - or, maybe at this stage, if - the campaign eventually gets going.

Eight Grand Prix need to be completed in order to constitute a Formula One season.

Unsurprisingly, the worldwide tennis and golf tours have been suspended with the French Open tennis at Rolland Garros moved, merely in hope at this stage, to the autumn.

And, although the Cheltenham Festival was somehow completed last week, the big Grand National meeting at Aintree at the start of April is off.

In terms of individual sports, snooker perhaps took longest to react to the developing crisis - and the Gibraltar Open still took place last week behind closed doors.

Yesterday, however, World Snooker bowed to the inevitable and announced a delay to Judd Trump's world title defence at the Crucible until July at the earliest.

Rather remarkably, the Tokyo-based 2020 Summer Olympics are still scheduled, for now, to go ahead from 24 July until 9 August.

"We will overcome the spread of the infection and host the Olympics without problem, as planned," Japanese PM Shinzo Abe said.

But, while the situation in Asia may have stabilised and even improved, Abe appears to be totally deluded if he thinks Tokyo 2020 will simply proceed without a hitch.

The Japanese reluctance to cancel or even merely delay the Games is understandable considering their outlay of around 1.35 trillion yen (£10.26bn).

Nevertheless, it is currently impossible to envisage anything except for the Olympics being added to the great sporting scrapheap of 2020.

Now, of course, football and sport carry no particular importance while the whole of the human race fronts up to a virulent pandemic. 

Legendary Liverpool manager Bill Shankly was sadly misguided when he famously declared that football was more important than life and death.

But, another great football man - former Italy and AC Milan head coach Arrigo Sacchi - was spot on with his assessment when he said: "Football is the most important of the least important things."

At the moment, it is much missed along with the other sporting events which allow otherwise inconsequential weeks to trundle into months, and months into years.

Worryingly, though, coronavirus is not going away any time soon - and, as the peak rapidly approaches, it is going to get worse far sooner than it gets better.

Stay safe, keep well everyone, and remember to wash your hands regularly.