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Cancelled football fixtures continue to pile up after the announcement of the death of the Queen last Thursday.
A whole round of fixtures that were supposed to be played over the weekend, plus Manchester United versus Leeds United and Chelsea versus Liverpool this weekend and Arsenal's Europa League game against PSV Eindhoven, will all have to be squeezed in somewhere.
But it's all getting a bit tight. Even with the English leagues kicking off a couple of weeks earlier than usual this season to accommodate the winter World Cup in Qatar, there aren't many slots into rearrange games into.
The European competitions are being played during midweek every week but one until early November, to get the group stages done before the domestic leagues break for the World Cup. Then when everything comes back together again it's pretty much Christmas, when teams will be playing three domestic games a week anyway. The earliest the postponed games could be played is 17 and 18 January, and there are only three other slots this season.
So far, nobody has worked out what to do about it. There is no simple fix. Pep Guardiola went a bit Jeff Goldblum when he was asked about it. Football, uh, finds a way.
"Maybe the Tottenham game will be in February or March because now I think it is not possible," he said on Tuesday. "We will find a way. There’s the Carabao Cup, FA Cup at that moment but we will find a way."
Some have called for third and fourth round replays to be scrapped for the FA Cup, and for the Carabao Cup semis to be one leg rather than two.
The bigger question is why this has happened at all. The Premier League's explanation for the upcoming cancellations is that with somewhere between 400,00 and 750,000 people flooding London for the ceremonies around the Queen's lying in state and funeral, it wouldn't be able to guarantee the safety of games if they went ahead.
Police constabularies from all over the country are being sent down to London to help keep the peace (read: arrest anyone shouting at Prince Andrew).
"Following extensive consultation with clubs, police, local Safety Advisory Groups and other relevant authorities, there was no other option but to postpone the three fixtures," the Premier League said.
But if, as it seemed last Friday when the cancellations were announced, it was only about the balancing of sensitivities and a nebulous 'mark of respect', that was a bizarre decision. Yet more bizarrely, not only were all professional games called off at the weekend, but all amateur games too.
When Sheffield International FC announced that its league game against Byron House had been cancelled, and immediately replaced by a friendly against Byron House at the same kick-off time, the league called it "disrespectful and despicable behaviour".
The 20,000 people at the Oval who watched England knock over South Africa, and the hundreds of thousands of rugby fans across the country who went to their games as normal would, presumably, be quite upset to realise they were engaging in disrespectful and despicable behaviour.
Though they missed out on pay, the staff who had been down to work shifts at football stadiums stewarding, serving from food kiosks and cleaning can at least console themselves that they didn't. Bayern Munich fans showed some solidarity at their match against Barcelona on Tuesday evening, unfurling a banner reading: "Last minute match delays and bans because of a royal's death?! Respect fans!"
Quite apart from the unfair treatment of workers, it feels like somewhere underneath it all is a basic mistrustfulness of football fans in particular. The football establishment's fear of accidentally doing something wrong and incurring the wrath of Yer Man In The Street seems to be matched only by the fear of allowing fans to express themselves in a non-sanctioned way.
The cricket crowd's pin-drop silence and rendition of 'God Save the King' as a mass of people rolled the unfamiliar words around their mouths for the first time, were exactly the kind of semi-spontaneous feeling people were after. There have been no flashpoints at football matches yet, even in famously monarchy-ambivalent Liverpool.
All of which points to a missed opportunity. English football thinks of itself as the national game, and takes its responsibilities with chest-puffing seriousness. Over the last decade it's whipped itself into a vortex of remembrance, commemoration and enforced solemnity.
We've watched as Armistice Day has become more and more grandiose and bizarre over the last decade. Tranmere Rovers' decision to remember the fallen by sending a giant, walking poppy mascot out to the centre circle in 2017 was particularly Brass Eye.
The game has become used to ostentatious, stage-managed moments when we put a particular, refined, noble feeling on display. And with that, it seems like genuinely spontaneous, uncontrolled feeling has become something lewd and scary.
What if a fan shouts something during a minute's silence? What if an individual expresses something outside of the sanctioned feeling-moment? What if not everybody in the country feels exactly the way we want them to?
The tributes will doubtless be impeccably observed. But we've missed the chance to come together and felt whatever it was we were feeling on a day that won't come again.
