News on the WSL? Surely tomorrow

Reload Twitter, check for emails from The FA, talk to players, read articles about the possible restart of the WSL. Reload Twitter, check for emails from The FA, talk to players, read articles about the possible restart of the WSL. Reload Twitter, check…

The pros, the cons, the unknowns. Postulate on them all. Echo your contemporaries. Run out of things to write, twiddle your thumbs, remember to clap for the NHS. Reload Twitter…

Almost three months have passed since a WSL took place in England. If you scrunch your face up and focus, you might be able to remember the last round of fixtures played in WSL – not a full round mind you. The weeks of flooding in February had a knock-on effect leaving Arsenal contesting an FA Cup match against Lewes when Manchester City and Chelsea shared the spoils in a 3-3 draw in Manchester.

The title race remained a close-run thing, as did the sprint to avoid the drop. The winter window brought about promise – and a bevvy of Australian internationals. In a 12 team-league, having three teams fighting for the title and three fighting to avoid the lone relegation spot made for more drama. In theory six teams were just trying to better their lot whilst the other six were involved in the nitty-gritty.

Every match week would have brought about something. Yes, there was the hand-wringing, unavoidable polarisation; the type that always seems exaggerated and magnified in the women’s game. But there was the greater sense of growth in England, of a league finally starting to settle after more upheavals that some would have liked.

We enjoyed ????, did you? ?#BarclaysFAWSL pic.twitter.com/qUVMIfUSkE

— Barclays FA Women’s Super League (@BarclaysFAWSL) February 23, 2020

Women’s football isn’t men’s football. It has never been men’s football and after a 50-year ban in England, it was still shivering in the long shadow cast by the men’s game. The shining English Premier League: the staple and the standard. But no, this isn’t an argument for the standard of the domestic game in England being better or worse than in Germany or Spain or anywhere you could point at on a globe. This is just an acceptance of the behemoth of a league the Premier League is.

For any women’s league to try to exist in the same breath as that is a big ask.

And yet, as we’ve sought clarification from The FA, the other side of the scales have routinely be dragged downwards by the EPL. If this is how the Premier League will conclude, then surely the WSL…

A dangerous path to flitter down, not least when Lewes have estimated that it will cost £3 million for top two tiers to conclude as normally as possible, with all 82 remaining matches played. Let alone the human side that will come with what’s been asked.

Reload Twitter, check for emails from The FA… oh, news. Finally, news from football association. A press release that offered up little in the way of news. Reload Twitter, look out the window, remember the last football match you attended, read another opinion piece…

We’ve issued a statement regarding the decision-making process for the remainder of the @BarclaysFAWSL and @FAWC_ campaigns:

— The FA (@FA) May 18, 2020

The truncation of the top two tiers is a growing inevitability – regardless of what happens with the Premier League. How promotion, relegation and Champions League spots are decided are assumed to be what’s causing the delay from the powers that be. So we wait. From players to pundits to fans; whatever our day to day has become in lockdown, we continue in a restless limbo.

With or without the government’s riddled messages, offering head-spinning contradiction, lockdown continues to stretch out before the British people, waiting for that infernal curve to flatten. The cliché, the unprecedented times we’re inhabiting, the lack of definites from The FA seems almost fitting. Yet wholly unfair to those within the clubs, from the part to the full-time who can’t plan without conclusivity.

Reload Twitter, check for emails from The FA, ask Vladimir to tell you a joke…

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