Pep Guardiola’s call is well placed and better still would be for a streamlined FA Cup to emerge with the final in FebruaryWhen Jürgen Klopp was asked last week for his thoughts on the Africa Cup of Nations being moved to January next year he spoke uninterrupted for almost eight minutes, detailing his dissatisfaction with the burden on players and clubs and the complete lack of meaningful response from anyone in charge of the game when managers complained of the dangers of trying to cram too much into an already crowded fixture list.
A few days later when
Pep Guardiola was asked for his views on fixture congestion, bearing in mind that Harry Kane and Marcus Rashford had been sidelined long term, almost certainly as a result of playing too many games in too short a space of time, the
Manchester City manager was ready with a plan of action. Scrap a competition, was the gist of his reply. Most likely the Carabao Cup. “We need less games, less competitions, less games,” Guardiola said. That should have been fewer, or course, but this is not the time to be picking up a non-native English speaker on his grammar. What Guardiola said next was spot on. “People can live without football for a while. It’s too much.”