The Africa Cup of Nations returns in January and looks set to leave a number of Premier League clubs short of key players, some more than others! The following list shows the downside of having too many AFCON players in a club's squad, the most severely hit would be Watford with FIVE players due to be jetting off after boxing day!
FIVE: Watford : FOUR: Arsenal, Leicester, Palace THREE: Brentford, Liverpool and Villa TWO: Chelsea, Everton, Man Utd and Southampton ONE: Brighton, Burnley, Man City and West Ham NONE: Leeds, Newcastle, Norwich and Tottingham
AFCON players could leave their club sides after the Boxing Day fixtures have been played, consequently players who advance through to the latter stages of the tournament could now be away from their teams for as long as six weeks, some players will not fly back until the second week of February. The competition is scheduled to start on January 9th, concluding just under a month later on February 6th.
Players were schedule to leave before or on Boxing Day for quarantining regulations, however, to paraphrase Clarkson "That's all 'aboot' to change!" The terrifying new Omicron variant of the Covid Pandemic has thrown all previous planning in to chaos, information is scant as to how quickly this new strain will spread and more importantly how much more dangerous, if at all, the new strain is.
We have access to one of the leading medical professors who has worked on finding Covid solutions from the very beginning, Jonathan Abel and he said it could take up to SIX weeks to properly identify the strain and adapt vaccines accordingly, the problem for AFCON being that there is an extremely low vaccination uptake in many African regions and as such the competition is in jeopardy of being cancelled.
This is a fast moving story and we will have further updates when 'substantiated' information becomes available. - LN
Comments
At the moment,
Africa is on the red list, so no one will go?