In all honesty, we’ve only just begun to see the torrential number of ways in which COVID-19 can disrupt football in a purely sporting sense.
Major League Soccer’s regular season has been severely disrupted by the pandemic with a logjam of postponed matches that can no longer be completed before the start of the playoffs, forcing qualification to be determined on a points-per-game basis rather than the final standings.
Over in Europe, Serie A’s decision to hand Juventus a 3-0 victory over Napoli and deduct the Neapolitans a point will have serious implications on the Scudetto race, while Juve itself had to line up against Barcelona in the Champions League without Cristiano Ronaldo after the 35-year-old tested positive for 19 days.
On Tuesday, Ajax travels to Denmark to play Midtjylland in a must-win match for both clubs as Liverpool and Atalanta threaten to run away with the top spots in Group D.
Unfortunately for Ajax and celebrated manager Erik ten Hag, the club will only have 17 players available after Dutch media reported that 11 players had tested positive for coronavirus.
Some of the players that haven’t travelled include captain Dušan Tadić, midfielders Davy Klaassen and Ryan Gravenberch, as well as the goalkeeping trio of André Onana, Maarten Stekelenburg and Dominik Kotarski.
Ajax has included only one goalkeeper in its squad, 20-year-old Kjell Scherpen. Tuesday will mark his debut.
Ten Hag, however, isn’t making any excuses.
“We know what to do,” he said at Monday’s press conference. “We are going to do it with the players we have. They are all good footballers and fit guys, too. It may be that one or two players will end up in a different position.”
Word can’t express how much I love this sentiment from the Ajax manager. If ever there was a club that could play shorthanded and with players shoehorned into various positions across the pitch, it’s the club that Johan Cruyff defined through the tactical theory of Total Football.
Total Football is the idea that “any outfield player can take over the role of any other player in a team.” The fluidity of it all — with players moving around but being instantly replaced to retain the team’s organizational structure — depends entirely on the adaptability of the players, but this is a philosophy that’s still expounded on at Ajax’s Sportpark De Toekomst in Ouder-Amstel.
Really I just want to see Edson Álvarez play striker.
