The Premier League has refused a request to move a Liverpool fixture which has already been rescheduled once.
The Reds make the trip to face Aston Villa next Wednesday, with the game being brought forward from its original date of 15 March due to our involvement in the Carabao Cup final that weekend.
It’s left both clubs facing an intense schedule of five matches in either 14 or 15 days before the end of February, and the Midlands outfit had sought to get it moved for a second time.
Premier League refuses Villa’s fixture request
However, as reported by John Percy for The Telegraph, the Premier League has rebuffed Villa’s request for the fixture to be rescheduled for the third week in March, leaving the 1982 European Cup winners ‘frustrated’ at having four top-flight matches in the upcoming fortnight but only one in the whole of next month.
Liverpool have a similarly distorted calendar, and both clubs are also involved in the Champions League round of 16, which’ll be played in the first two midweeks of March.
Whereas Arne Slot thankfully has a mostly clean bill of health, though, Unai Emery is contending with a spate of injuries, with Ollie Watkins, Pau Torres, Tyrone Mings, Matty Cash, Amadou Onana and Ross Barkley all sidelined for last weekend’s FA Cup win over Tottenham.
Premier League had no other option
Whilst we can understand Villa’s frustration and very much empathise with it given that the Reds are in a similar situation, the reality is that the Premier League had no viable alternative to next Wednesday for rescheduling the original fixture.
There’s a midweek round of top-flight games the week after next, while the third and fourth midweeks in March overlap with the international break, and the EPL were never likely to risk incurring the wrath of numerous national team bosses by depriving them of players for competitive games.
Had the Villans been knocked out of the FA Cup last Sunday, the weekend of 1/2 March would’ve been free, but unlike us they succeeded in making it to the fifth round, in which they host Cardiff in a fortnight’s time.
The only other option for the Premier League would’ve been to defer the rescheduled Villa v Liverpool game to April or May, but a free fixture date then could’ve been hard to come by if both teams go far in the Champions League and Emery’s side make it to the semi-finals of the domestic cup competition.
The situation once again shines a critical spotlight on the sheer number of matches demanded of elite-level footballers in the modern era, an issue that Virgil van Dijk (among others) has condemned publicly. Sooner or later, there genuinely will be no more room at the inn.
