Gary Sweet is confident that the current season can be completed in 56 days once Coronavirus testing is implemented for footballers – but not before the ‘absolute heroes’ in the NHS.
A letter to all 71 EFL clubs from league chairman Rick Parry laid out a plan to complete the current season in a condensed timeframe from the 74 days it was due to take had football not been shutdown indefinitely due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
However, the regular season would likely be required to finish in 35 days, with a fortnight reserved for the play-offs.
Luton have nine games left to play, so that timescale could see them take to the field almost every four days to complete their fixtures.
Parry’s letter also recommended that matches would only resume when it was safe to do so and that players could not return to training until at least May 16, which would suggest a resumption in action by early June at the earliest.
Town’s chief executive, Sweet said: “Of course the season can be finished in 56 days, you’ve only got to calculate, we’ve got nine games that can be done in five weeks, that’s 35 and then you’ve got play-offs. Play-offs can be done easily in 14 days, so it can be done, if we want to.
“It’s not the timescale so much, it’s so there’s no risk. And if we’re going to test people, we have to make sure that there are the requisite number of testing facilities and kits available that don’t impact the resources for more emergency need.
“So, there’s a whole range of moral dilemmas that we now, as chief executives of mere football clubs, now have to be intelligent about in order to support one way or another.”
The government has announced plans for 100, 000 Covdid-19 tests per day in the UK by the end of April, having so far only given them to the seriously ill in hospital and frontline NHS staff, though reports earlier this week suggested that only 43,000 NHS staff have been tested.
Sweet said: “The health service are the absolute heroes of ours now, it’s not the footballers, it’s the doctors and nurses that are risking their lives, they of course come firs.
“But the one thing in all of this, football is a very, very important product for society and it’s a very, very important product for the government.
“The government is supporting football and wants football to come out of this absolutely intact for the sanity if our society, and so the leagues have a hotline into COBRA, or into the Home Office and into DCMS (Department of Culture, Media and Sport), where they’re getting guidance all the way.
“Football would not make a decision and could not make a decision to take testing kits ahead of the NHS, so this is way beyond the Luton Town problem.
“It’s one that I have to be concerned about as I, like many around the country, are very concerned about the lack of testing and the lack of PPE (personal protective equipment) that’s available for doctors and nurses.
“We ‘ve tried to get involved in products and tried to increase productions in those items, but when we come back, whenever that might be, it needs to be safe, it needs to ensure that it doesn’t impact on the resources on the NHS and those front-line workers, but it (testing) does need to happen.”
