Gary Taylor-Fletcher column: Why the season must be played to an end and memories of Blackpool’s run to the play-offs

It’s a good time to be going through some coaching work to make sure I’m not rusty and am ready to start applying for jobs as soon as the lockdown finishes.

I saw the interview given by the Mayor of Liverpool last week, saying the season should be scrapped and Liverpool crowned champions.

It’s well known around the city that he is a big Everton fan and his suggestions do leave a lot of questions unanswered.

It would be easy enough to give the title to Liverpool but what about everyone else? How would the other league positions be finalised for Europe and possibly relegation?

My own view remains that they have to find a way to complete the season on the field when it is safe to do so.

The Mayor makes the point that you would still have crowds of fans congregating outside grounds if the matches were behind closed doors, even if they were at neutral venues.

There’s no doubt that if Liverpool were about to win the league, the fans would want to celebrate. But you’d like to think the vast majority would be sensible and do so in a safe way.

Playing behind closed doors is nobody’s ideal scenario but it may be the only way. And so many teams have so much to play for that they have to find a way to play the games.

I think that applies in the EFL too, though I appreciate the concerns over the costs of playing behind closed doors.

I wonder if there could be a benefit fund from the Premier League to help the lower leagues with the costs of completing games.

On the subject of football helping out financially, a lot has been said and written about footballers taking pay cuts and I’d just make a few points.

Some footballers do earn very good money for a short time but a lot of that money is taxed and so is helping the Government with the schemes it has put in place to help people in this crisis.

Thirty per cent pay cuts to players would mean many millions in lost taxes, while a lot of people who make very good money manage to pay no tax at all.

As a group of people, I’ve always found footballers happy to give financial help where it is needed and to help charities, often without making a public show of it.

Moving on, there’s plenty of time to reflect at the moment and my mind goes back 10 years to our promotion to the Premier League.

On the corresponding weekend just gone, Blackpool played their last Championship game against Bristol City and clinched the final play-off place with a 1-1 draw.

We knew a win would guarantee our play-off place and we thought we’d need one because Swansea were at home to Doncaster, who were mid-table and didn’t have anything at stake.

It was a nervy game and we went behind, but we always had the belief and Brett Ormerod’s equaliser was enough because Swansea could only draw 0-0.

There was pressure there because the whole season came down to that game and to miss out right at the end would have been difficult to take.

It all fell into place for us because we got Nottingham Forest in the semi, who we’d done the double over and had beaten only a couple of weeks earlier.

We were confident about facing Cardiff too because they hadn’t beaten us, but we were less confident about Leicester, after losing to them twice.

As I say, it all went right for us with Cardiff beating Leicester in the other semi and you know what happened next.

Of course we’d been planning to celebrate the 10th anniversary of that promotion but all that is on hold until it is safe to have a get-together.

If we were able to do something in August, maybe we could time it to coincide with that first game of 2010-11 against Wigan, when we won 4-0 and were top of the Premier League for an hour. Happy days.