Christmas is on the horizon, and it offers us the chance to reconnect with what is important in our lives: namely an absurd level of football live on television.
The traditional Boxing Day/Stephenseseses (etc) Day fixture list has been trimmed somewhat, so as to allow games be splintered across virtually every day of the holiday season.
This has its benefits for the viewer: it means we have to spend as little of the holidays making small talk as possible, and can maximise time spent staring vacantly at a television.
The trade-off is that it puts quite taxing demands on the poor millionaire footballers, who have to spend more time than usual dragging their limbs through the frosty air.
And the hardest worked this year will be the players of Liverpool, who will spend their New Year gegenpressing, and not at a whole lot else.
The club have today failed in their bid to move their trip to Sunderland on January 2nd back by a few hours. That game is slated for 3pm, but the club requested it be put back to allow for a little more recovery time after the New Year's Eve clash with Man City, taking place at Anfield at 5.30pm.
The Premier League's rationale behind the refusal to move the Sunderland game is that, in theory, moving games on a case-by-case basis may hand one side a competitive advantage.
The City game is on the evening time to suit BT Sport's schedule, and means that there will be only 45-and-a-half hours between Liverpool's respective kick offs, a time in which they have to factor in the not inconsiderable distance of a trip to Sunderland.
City, too, face the same gap ahead of their game against Burnley, although they do have the benefit of playing at home.
Much has been made of Liverpool having a competitive advantage in the fact that they usually only have one game a week, so, should Liverpool come up short this season, this schedule may be one of the reasons cited.
[Guardian]
