Tottenham midfielder Tanguy Ndombele celebrates his goal with Steven Bergwijn this Sunday against Sheffield.LAURENCE GRIFFITHS / AFP
The unstoppable advance of the British strain of covid-19 tightens the fence on the most popular vestige of an old expression of community happiness: the goal hug.
A record of more than a thousand daily deaths in the last week and a peak of 36,000 people hospitalized - far from the 21,700 of the April level - have put UK hospitals on the brink of collapse and the conservative government of Boris Johnson under a pressure that did not know when, established the third confinement in much of the Islands, the party of the English Soccer Cup revealed a scandalous contrast.
The promiscuous display of the players of Crowley, a fourth category club, embracing each other with passion to celebrate each goal during the elimination of Leeds (3-0), unleashed the same social outrage as the video posted by the Chorley boys singing in chorus
Someone Like You
, Adele, cuddled in the locker room after eliminating Derby County on the naive assumption that the PCR tests guaranteed them a bubble of asepsis.
Oliver Dowden, Secretary of State for Culture, summoned representatives of the English Federation, the Premier, and the English Football League, to warn them that the Government is considering suspending competitions.
Sports and tourism minister Nigel Huddelston called for exemplary social distancing: “There are safe anti-covid rules in football;
footballers must follow them and the responsible authorities must enforce them rigorously ”.
Julian Knight, chairman of Parliament's committee on media, culture and sport, called footballers "mindless."
"Sometimes the brain acts unconsciously," said Pep Guardiola, the Manchester City manager, when asked if it was possible for footballers to avoid social contact in the happy moment of the goal.
Under the government threat of closing the league, as happened between March and June, Richard Masters, executive director of the Premier, presented on Wednesday a new protocol to stop the advance of the highly infectious mutation of the virus, which this season has caused the suspension of five games for multiple infections.
According to the players consulted, the organization sent everyone a digital file indicating the rules.
From now on, all templates will undergo three weekly PCR controls instead of two and, even then, they will not have to act as if they presume that their colleagues are healthy.
The use of masks in the rallies and in the dressing room will go from being optional to mandatory and no dressing room may be occupied with more than ten people, except in the halftime talks of the matches, which, eventually, the coach will give the headlines exclusively.
Generally speaking, conversations and meetings will take place outdoors or in covered pavilions with high ceilings.
No treatment of a player and his physiotherapist may last for more than 15 minutes, although the average of the massages lasts more than 20. Compliance with these criteria will be supervised by two inspectors from the Premier who will act sausages in each team.
"Unnecessary contacts"
The most picturesque rule imposes avoiding “unnecessary contacts”, such as handshakes, exchanges of shirts between opponents and affectionate hugs in the celebration of the goal.
"We ask players to avoid hugging," Masters noted.
With no public, football barely had the commercial skeleton left when the new order threatens to sterilize it a little more.
"We are all interested in complying with the protocol to save our contracts," says a veteran Premier player on the sly, "but hugs are the only thing that is practically inevitable."
Whitehall politicians must have clutched their heads if they turned on their televisions this weekend.
The Premier's day began with a hug from Matheus Pereira and Robert Snodgrass;
it was extended with another hug from Pedro Neto, Fabio Silva and Willy Boly;
continued with another fraternal pineapple from Kyle Bartley with Semui Ajayi;
then with another affectionate meeting of Leandro Trossard and Alexis Mc Allister;
and with another hug from Vladimir Coufal, Tomas Soucek and Michail Antonio;
and another hugged more Tammy Abraham, Callum Hudson-Odoi and Mason Mount, blissful in front of the cameras as if no one saw them.
More devoted to the ritual than to the law, the players of Wolverhampton, West Brom, West Ham, Brighton, Chelsea, Tottenham or Manchester City, effusively breached the ban on hugging in most matches this weekend. week.
