Matt Maher: Sam Allardyce made a fair point, but time is against Premier League

The timing, admittedly, didn’t help – Allaydyce’s Albion team had just been thumped 5-0 at home by Leeds, ensuring a general response along the lines of ‘yes, well, he would say that, wouldn’t he?’

Yet when taken in isolation

Allardyce’s viewpoint also made a lot of sense, certainly in health terms.

The Premier League is not immune to the crisis engulfing the rest of the country. It is reasonable to assume the number of players and club staff testing positive for the virus, which hit a new record high this week, will continue to climb for the time being. So too, you suspect, will the number of postponed matches, with three having been called off since December 28.

That is where Allardyce’s proposal falls down, at least in the offices of the league, where even the thought of having to reorganise what is already the busiest season in history will cause chills.

With only three weeks between the campaign’s scheduled completion and the start of the European Championships, already postponed once from last summer, there is simply not enough slack in the calendar to incorporate a two-week delay.

With other leagues across the continent continuing as normal, the Premier League certainly does not want to be the one to blink.

The league will argue, with some justification, it has done the best job it possibly could since the pandemic began. Extending last season to the end of July was always going to have a knock-on effect. No-one is pretending fitting a full programme into a month-shorter timeframe is easy.

There may be some regret, however, at the failure to previously agree a framework for how a curtailed season should be determined.

Last season the league’s decision to effectively kick the can down the road during the first lockdown proved a worthy time-buying exercise.

This time the wall is already in view. Should the worst happen and the season have to be halted even for a brief period, the league will very quickly find itself back in the same discussions which dominated last spring, yet under considerably more pressure to actually make a decision.

Risking bad PR by playing on when the rest of the country grinds to a halt is comfortably preferable to myriad of issues pausing the season would create. Make no mistake, the show must go on.