At last, there is light at the end of the tunnel.
After six long weeks in hibernation, spring is belatedly breaking and Spanish society is slowly starting to open up. Last weekend, children were finally allowed out of the house to play.
On Saturday, adults will be able to go out on their own. And on Monday, La Liga’s footballers will return to training on a restricted, individual basis.
The roadmap towards finishing a tantalisingly poised season is becoming clearer. And let’s hope those plans come to fruition, because there will be much to enjoy in the remaining 11 match-days: Barcelona and Real Madrid are separated by just one point at the top of the table; five teams have just five points between them in the race for Champions League places; six points separate 15th place from 19th in the scrap to avoid relegation.
There is much to play for, and the unpredictable nature of the season so far – which has seen the top two drops points against 13 different teams – should ensure plenty of excitement and drama over the course of June and July, all being well.
But what kind of shape will teams be in? Will they be ready to compete after such a strange and unexpected gap in their season?
Considering the restrictions they face, is there enough time to prepare properly before action resumes?
Well, maybe this is an overly optimistic viewpoint, but it’s easy to argue that players should be in better condition than they usually are when a new season begins in mid-August. This is why.
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A typical summer for top-flight footballers isn’t really much of a summer at all.
Generally the previous season will have finished at the end of May, perhaps sneaking into June for Champions League finalists. Then, every other year, the majority of players from elite competitions such as La Liga will head into an international tournament, keeping them in action throughout June and into the early weeks of July.
After that, there’s a brief chance for a holiday – perhaps a couple of weeks on the beaches of Ibiza or the Caribbean, although family gatherings and commercial commitments generally cut into that break.
Then, towards the end of July, it’s already time for players to return to duty with the onset of pre-season training, often still carrying the same injuries they were hampered by at the end of the previous season, or even beset by new physical problems they picked up during the summer.
Even the pre-season training programme, supposedly a time of carefully planned preparation for the challenges that lie ahead, is an irritatingly disrupted period, with the vast majority of big clubs now much of their time jetting across the continents to fulfil their obligations for lucrative summer tours.
As preparation for a nine-month, 50-plus game slog, a traditional pre-season is far from ideal.
Now? For the first time in their careers, players have been spending the last six weeks at home, genuinely resting.
No transatlantic flights for overblown exhibition games, no trips to television studios, no photoshoots for ‘brand ambassador’ campaigns. Just, like the rest of us, staying at home and spending time with the family.
During the lockdown, players have been granted the rare luxury of time to allow their bodies to heal from the inevitable aches and pains that build up over the course of a season. The niggling hamstring, the tight calf, the bothersome shoulder… they have all slowly faded away, with players allowed to listen to their bodies and follow their own training schedule in the gym or the garden rather than putting themselves through the relentless and arduous grind of playing, training and travelling on a loop.
Returning from that extended period of rest to play 11 games over the course of a couple of months? It should be a walk in the park.
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There is also another group of people who should particularly benefit from the unusual circumstances surrounding the impending restart: coaches.
At the start of a conventional season, coaches and managers are confronted by all the disruptive intrusions outlined above, plus another even greater source of frustration: the transfer market. Right up until the start of the season, or for even longer depending upon exactly when the window finally closes, the task of squad planning is reduced to a matter of guesswork.
Who might leave, who might arrive, which agents will push for a pay rise, which players will return from their holidays discontent, which youth team players will demand elevation into the senior squad… from June to August the composition of a squad becomes an intricate jigsaw with the added complication of a few key pieces being removed or thrown in at the drop of a hat.
Even when the identity of the playing squad is decided, the start of a season still requires the integration of summer signings as the new group of players become accustomed to each other’s strengths and weaknesses, and coaches start to figure out how they can work effectively together.
This process is not always a quick one, and it can often take several competitive games for teams to find their shape and establish a playing pattern that works.
With the ‘pre-season’ coming up now, however, none of those concerns apply. Coaches have the unique opportunity to start afresh with exactly the same group of players at their disposal – even better, they have been able to spend the last two months reviewing videos from their team’s most recent games, working out how to improve flaws and maximise qualities safe in the knowledge that the make-up of the team will not be any different when the season resumes.
Quique Setien, for example, will have been able to take stock of his first dozen games as Barcelona manager in a detailed manner that would never normally be possible. Some of his ideas have worked well, while others have been less effective.
The normal March-to-May routine would not allow a coach like Setien to sit back, take stock and make a serious analysis of those strengths and shortcomings, but that’s exactly how he has been spending the last few weeks.
Just as Zinedine Zidane can calmly consider exactly what went wrong in Real Madrid’ last game, their 2-1 loss at Real Betis, and hold conference calls with his coaching staff to explore ideas before reaching informed and meaningful conclusions.
Unlike an average pre-season, if any team re-enters the action for the remaining 11 games in a state of unpreparedness, they will only have themselves to blame.
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All of this sounds great: rested and fit players joining forces with tactically prepared coaches. The perfect scenario for a thrilling finale to the campaign.
However, it wouldn’t take much for all these optimistic plans to come crumbling to the ground and the season to plunge into a this-time irreparable delay.
Wisely and inevitably, Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez has made it clear that the country’s de-escalation of restrictions will not follow a set timetable, and will instead be guided by the level of infections.
It is perfectly possible that the imminent reopening of society will lead to a second wave of cases, which would obviously and rightly mean an unspecified delay to the return to normality – including the staging of sporting contests.
Perhaps even more concerning, though, is the enormous difficulty in keeping La Liga’s 500 players and several hundred more support staff virus-free over a two-month period. It would, surely, only take one player on one team to be tested positive for the whole of the season to collapse.
In the hypothetical case, for example, that Eibar left-back Cote fell ill and was shown to be suffering from Covid-19, everyone he had come into contact with over the previous couple of weeks would have to immediately enter quarantine – including every member of Eibar’s staff and their recent opponents.\
In turn, every member of staff from every team they had played in the past couple of weeks, which – considering the fairly congested schedule – could quickly spread to cover half the league.
One team being unable to finish the season due to one isolated infection would effectively mean that no teams could finish the season, and considering the reality that the virus has only been contained, not eradicated, it’s very ambitious to hope that La Liga can stay entirely virus-free for long enough to complete the 110 outstanding fixtures.
So, the future is looking brighter and next week’s scheduled return to training is very good news, but there is still plenty of potential for dark clouds to quickly gather. We can only cross our fingers and hope that the light at the end of the tunnel does not prove to be the front of an oncoming train.
