MOLINEUX — Eleven vs 11, just about, and a full house at Molineux hinted at a regular Premier League fixture. Except we knew it wasn’t.
What unfolded was a weird Covid Sunday in the middle of an escalating pandemic. Fears that the integrity of the competition could be perverted by the arbitrary nature of match determinations in the light of positive tests, might be playing out already.
Chelsea had a request to postpone rejected following three further positive tests for coronavirus, bringing the total to seven. Thomas Tuchel could name only six subs, two of them were goalkeepers, and a third, Matteo Kovacic, had been out for 11 games.
Thus were Chelsea here under sufferance. They didn’t want to play, as Tuchel told the BBC before the match.
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“We were made to be in the bus and travel together for three hours, were in meeting together, in dinner and lunch and the situation does not feel like it will stop.
“We applied to not play and put the situation under control and it was rejected. It is very hard to understand it, we are concerned about the health of the players. We end up with players who play coming from injuries and we take the risk.”
It was not until the second half that Chelsea approached coherence and with Manchester City two up at Newcastle, the need for them to shake a leg after the break was obvious.
They did so but it wasn’t enough. Wolves held out to inflict on Chelsea a draw that took the number of points dropped in relation to the league leaders to nine over the past six games.
This might have happened anyway. But with only one of six matches surviving on Saturday it is clear elite football is unable to escape the reach of a virus that has brought us to the point of crisis yet again. Other than shutting down it is not immediately clear what the answer might be.
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The difficulty in this phase of the pandemic is the absence yet of reliable evidence about the impact of the Omicron variant, though there is prima facie research from America’s NFL that offers hope. Speaking to Reuters, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell explained how American football had changed its testing approach in response to Omicron.
“In many respects, Omicron appears to be a very different illness from the one we first confronted in the spring of 2020,” he said. “While more players and staff are testing positive, roughly two-thirds of those individuals are asymptomatic, most of the remaining individuals have only mild symptoms, and the virus appears to clear positive individuals more rapidly than was true with the Delta.”
This suggests the Omicron wave will touch the majority more lightly and pass through more quickly. However, we are still weeks away from establishing reliable patterns and consequence – and it should be noted that 94.6 per cent of NFL players are vaccinated, a figure significantly higher than the Premier League.
Since football is not hermetically sealed it is indivisible from the rest of society and no more able to resist or predict the future. The question becomes to what extent is the safety of the players and the competition compromised by infections, and how do you agree a standard measure? So we either shut down or limp on. If it is to be the latter the authorities must publish their reasoning and explain who gets to play and why.
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Denied the services of Romelu Lukaku, Timo Werner and Callum Hudson-Odoi, among other victims, Tuchel’s selection laboured against a Wolves team minded to take advantage. Tuchel compensated for the first-half malaise gripping his players by pouring out instructions from the technical area. It was perhaps the misfortune of those operating nearest the touchline that they should the recipients of counsel that seemed more opprobrium than advice.
Though the second half was much more like it Chelsea could not find a way past Jose Sa. His save to deny Christian Pulisic was off the scale, as was Conor Coady’s injury-time block to keep out N’Golo Kante.
The result left Chelsea six points adrift of City and Tuchel far from happy.
“I don’t care about the point,” Tuchel said.
“I gave my opinion [on Covid], the club gave its opinion. We talk a lot about safety and protecting the players. Not so sure we did this today. On we go.
“If we have tomorrow and the next test and the next positive I would like to speak to the Premier League about what they expect. If they make us play against Brentford shall we not arrive or not train? What should we do?”
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