Fleetwood boss Joey Barton still has a head for heights as football is grounded
Coronavirus has not kept Fleetwood Town boss Joey Barton indoors, though Highbury Stadium will remain a rather desolate place for at least another week.
Town’s players are not training as a group but have each been given individual fitness programmes to observe while Highbury and the club’s Poolfoot Farm training base remain out-of-bounds. Both venues are closed to the public and all football activity on either site has ceased.
Football club staff are working from home, while the only offices at Highbury and Poolfoot still operational are those concerned with chairman Andy Pilley’s other businesses. The owner himself is in South Africa, where much of his business activity is now based.
All players and staff have provisionally been told to stay away from the club for a further week, and until yesterday the players were under instruction to prepare for a return to action against Milton Keynes Dons on April 4.
That changed when the football authorities extended the game’s shutdown to include the whole of April.
It means that if this season’s remaining fixtures are to be played, Town must find new dates for all nine of theirs in League One – they were not scheduled to play on the final weekend of the season in May.
Chief executive Steve Curwood is representing Town at meetings of English club representatives to determine the way forward.
Fleetwood could look to tap into the £50m relief fund announced by the EFL on Wednesday.
However, it was unclear whether the plan was to distribute this crisis cash among all EFL clubs.