5 star Hotel, 2 star Hotel, it doesn't matter when it comes to bodily recovery.
At an elite level, those 2 and a half hours do make a difference, no just physically, but mentally. I would bet my house that if you ask all of the Europa teams whether they would rather play at 3pm or 5pm on a Sunday, I'm sure you can guess what they would say.
And yes we have been in that situation before, but as you mentioned before, this season is like no other. We are already seeing the effect of the scheduling with a record amount of muscle injuries. So to make that schedule even tighter with late finishes coupled with early kick offs is a recipe for disaster.
Regarding your last point, it's hardly fair to beat the players with that stick, it wasn't as if they were on strike. We were in the middle of a lockdown. Therefore, I also don't think it's fair to say "right, you've had all that time off, so here's 5 matches in 2 weeks. You've got no right to complain".
I'm sure it does, but as I've said, and you agree this is not a normal season given the accumulation of months of football previously, with little rest.
I'll ask again, do you think certain clubs should be favoured? If you start moving fixtures to accommodate clubs, where does it end? What if you've had a 500 mile round trip in the Cup in midweek and then are scheduled at 12.30 Saturday? Can you move your game? Who decides that?
Everyone seems to be able to point to the obvious problem, specifically too much football in a short space of time, but doesn't have a solution. As I said above, if you keep moving games back, eventually you get a pile up, which managers always complain about. This is not an unforeseen problem and clubs had the chance to do business in the summer to try and alleviate the problem. Some will have, others won't and that will tell over the season.
And for clarity, I'm not sticking to boot into the players. They are not robots and fatigue is real. I respect footballers, but I don't put them up on a pedestal or laud them for doing the job for which they get paid. The clubs pay them and expect a return. They are a commodity and that's the reality. Players, and more importantly the clubs need to manage the problem and should (as I say above) have considered this in preparation for the season in terms of recruitment.
Perhaps we disagree on this. No problem with that and I'm not going to just repeat the points I've already made. What I would say is that as a United fan in particular, I find it hard to sympathise with the problem of tired players when the club has deadwood, probably taking home in excess of £500k a week sitting in the stands. Football, has been for a long time been a squad game.
That's been exacerbated by factors outside of anyone's control. What we seem to want is only enough football so that we can rely on the same 15 players week in week out because we've got numerous players who aren't good enough to get picked who we can't shift. If you need to rest Fernandes (who we are shockingly reliant upon), then a Lingard on £100k plus a week should be good enough to come in and do a job. The problem is, he isn't, and that money could be invested elsewhere. The state of the squad is not the fault of Covid-19, Sky or even the manager and past decisions are now coming home to roost.
