From the Terraces: Uncertain times for Harrogate Town - but they're not alone

I spent the Thursday of our third week in lockdown ruminating on how this would have been the bank holiday weekend where Town entertained Fylde before we all travelled to Stockport County on the Easter Monday, hopefully whilst in the thick of challenging for top spot.

It’s all a far cry from reality, who’d have thought a trip to Stockport would be so yearned for.

The National League is recommending that clubs vote to cancel the remaining regular season’s matches up to April 25, prior to issuing a set of options for concluding promotion and relegation issues.

Every team in the National League’s top tier will get an equal vote. We’re told null and void is not going to be an option. It doesn’t rule out play-off matches, and leaves Town in a state of complete uncertainty. But it isn’t just Town.

For example, how do you decide final league positions when clubs have completed different numbers of matches? Do you end with the table as it is now, or do you average out points per game?

How can teams, especially those in the relegation zone, vote to end the season without knowing what the further options are? They could be voting for their eventual demotion.

Most importantly, the fact remains that we’re still in the middle of a deadly pandemic where the UK may well turn out to be the worst affected country in Europe, and we‘re not even at the top of the curve yet.

We don’t yet know how things are going to pan out, what the eventual exit strategy from lockdown will be, and whether the infection will return in any great numbers.

According to the World Health Organisation, Covid-19 virus transmission declines at a far slower rate than it increases, and social distancing measures could well be with us for a very long time.

A phased return to some sort of normality is not going to include re-starting football matches with large crowds as one of the initial priorities, especially as sporting events and other social gatherings are the sort of places where clusters of the virus are thought to start up and spread.

So, would any subsequent play-off matches be played behind closed doors?

Of course, clubs could also vote against ending the normal season in the first instance.

It all leaves me even more confused than I was already. The National League appears more so, although admittedly under unprecedented circumstances.

On Saturday, I find myself walking through the woods with the dog on my once daily exercise allowance.

I can hear the sound of a football being kicked hard in the distance, more so now the background noise of passing traffic on the main road has disappeared.

I decide to veer off my normal route and skirt the grey metal fence past the St John Fisher School football pitches.

In the first week following the suspension of the National League, I spent a fair amount of time watching grassroots matches on these pitches, while the dog sat bored in the background, hoping to be taken home.

That’s before even those matches were cancelled. So now here I am, standing in a clump of weeds, peering through the fence at someone I don’t know smashing a football into a net in the far distance in order to get my football fix.

This is what it’s come to.

By Tuesday, I’m back at work in my small temporary home office.

I make the mistake of asking everybody, whilst in a team meeting on Skype, if they’d been anywhere good over the weekend.

I’m not sure that the front room counts.

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