When the powers that be at the 20 Premier League clubs gather on Monday to survey the state of play in a season which threatens to descend into Covid chaos, it will be styled as an unscheduled catch-up rather than an emergency summit.
And yet there is a distinct sense of scrambling to save the season as multiple fixtures fall by the wayside, some of them farcically late, such as Aston Villa against Burnley on Saturday, cancelled just two hours before kick-off.
With vaccination rates here by far the worst among the major leagues in Europe and with the Omicron variant advancing, it’s hard to see how further mass cancellations will be avoided.