Premier League and Football League have to help clubs navigate Covid crisis - Crawley Town boss John Yems

The Reds' League Two clash with Oldham Athletic has been called off due to positive Covid cases in the Crawley squad.

Reds general manager Tom Allman confirmed that, as of today [Friday, December 17], there have been '12 positive cases with a few more still to come in'.

At the time of writing, the rise of the Omicron variant has claimed five of this weekend's Premier League games and 19 fixtures in across the Football League.

Brentford boss Thomas Frank has called for the weekend's full round of Premier League fixtures and next week's Carabao Cup matches to be postponed to 'break the chain' on Covid and ensure Boxing Day's fixtures go ahead.

Premier League clubs are set to meet on Monday to discuss the escalating crisis around the coronavirus pandemic. The Football League have yet to make a decision on the matter.

Yems said: "It gives us a bit of time to get the injured boys back and it least we're going into it off the back of a win and a draw.

"But I do think the Football League and the Premier League have got to help the clubs a little bit, because it is not the clubs' responsibility to close things down.

"There is a lot of mixed messages out there. Tom [Allman] sees it from that side because he's in the office all day.

"But for us lot stuck at the training ground all you want to do is play football.

"Someone has got to take the lead and make the decision. I think the way that some of the players and managers, especially at the higher levels, have been coming out and saying about [stopping until] January, to me it makes so much sense.

"If you give a start date to start, at least it gives everybody a chance to sort tests out and training.

"It's a big ask for everybody and nobody knows. It's like trying to have a fight in the dark. You don't know what's going on.

"It's only because we have already got things in place, and it's a compliment to everyone who deals with that side of it, that we spotted the cases otherwise we could've gone on and got ourselves in more trouble.

"More importantly, the players could have got worse, the staff could have got worse on the supporters could have got things.

"But there's still a batch of us that will be out training that are fit enough to train because we don't want to be so far behind like we did last year.

"At least this year it's more universal and I think everyone will be in the same position. But we will have players training so we can make sure we're ready whenever we come back."

This week saw the Reds withdraw from the Sussex Senior Cup due to long-term injuries to several members of the first team squad and a busy Christmas schedule.

Crawley were due to visit SCFL Premier outfit Eastbourne Town on Tuesday evening in the third round of Sussex's premier knockout competition.

Yems said the decision to withdraw had nothing to do with how they see the competition, but down to how threadbare their squad was.

The Reds manager added: "If we didn't value the competition we wouldn't be in it.

"I think we're in the process of hopefully helping out Eastbourne, but we haven't got fit enough players. We had too many injured players to play.

"You get some people moaning, but they'll moan about anything. If they won £1 millions on the lottery they'd moan it wasn't £1.3 million.

"We haven't got players. We never had players fit at the football club.

"We had 18 fit players and those 18 fit players were due to play three games in practically a week-and-a-bit.

"We just couldn't afford anymore to get injured. Maybe with this thing [Covid], it can bring people back to reality because people's lives are on the line.