COVID, and particularly the new variant has taken a chunk out of the fixture list, and Bolton’s home game against Wycombe on Saturday will now not be played.
We had been struggling with injuries, but now a number of cases has meant the club can’t field a team. Will Aimson missed the Accrington match after a positive test, and that has presumably since spread to other players.
The EFL have clarified a game must be played if 14 players (including a goalkeeper) are available – it doesn’t take too much to get us below that threshold. There has been talk about stopping football entirely for a week or so. It’s difficult to see what that’ll achieve though, as if everything would be alright for Boxing Day. You either crack on unless a club literally can’t field a team or you have a longer, and probably impractical stoppage.
What doesn’t help is the poor vaccination rate amongst players – the EFL have said 25% of players currently don’t intend to get a vaccine, which is mad considering the amount of dubious stuff they’re probably quite happy to put in their bodies. What the situation is like at Bolton is anyone’s guess. Hopefully our players will be more sensible than others – at least in our case it’s our first real outbreak, after we managed to avoid any postponements last season that were of our doing.
Given how two doses of vaccine aren’t that effective against the new variant either, it seems as though football will have to deal with COVID for quite a while yet.