April 3, 2020 | Awake & Dreaming

Premier League clubs will ask players to take a combination of pay cuts and deferrals amounting to 30 percent of their salary due to the financial crisis caused by coronavirus, the league said in a statement on Friday. The league’s highly-paid players have come under increasing pressure to take pay cuts from government officials in recent days. “Premier League clubs unanimously agreed to consult their players regarding a combination of conditional reductions and deferrals amounting to 30 per cent of total annual remuneration,” the Premier League said in a statement.\

The Professional Footballers’ Association (PFA) will meet with league and club officials to discuss the proposal on Saturday. A meeting between the 20 English top-flight clubs also agreed to indefinitely extend the suspension of the season until it is “safe and appropriate” for football to return. The clubs are desperate for the season to be finished if possible to avoid the potential of having to reimburse broadcasters a reported USD 942 million if they fail to fulfil fixtures for television contracts. However, despite reports of creative ways to finish the campaign with matches behind closed doors and players quarantined in World Cup style training camps, the clubs insist they will follow government advice on when it is safe for matches to return.

Despite their own financial troubles, Premier League clubs agreed to provide a 125 million pound fund for the English Football League and National League to help those further down the football pyramid and a 20 million pound charitable donation to help those affected by coronavirus.

It has been now 14 days since I stepped out of my building and 11 days of the officially declared lockdown with people in my area/nation being in quarantine. 2 weeks of staying indoors and not seeing another soul other than my parents and the odd delivery guys from Swiggy & Zomato (they are allowed to do their jobs). Thank the advancements in technology that gave us these apps and others for ordering and getting food and other supplies directly to our homes.

Work has been going on. I’m even upgrading to a new plan that gives me higher speed for longer – 100mbps for a 750GB cap. That’s awesome. I’m currently attending a training for a new process that they want some of us to help out with on a temporary basis. Most of us are in India – Cochin, Hyderabad & Chennai while the person from our same company who is conducting the training is from the Philippines. All this is done with the aid of the internet, some applications we had to download and headsets and mics. Here I am below attending a session 2 days ago.

We’ve managed to get most of the groceries that we need. And they are adding more and more options every day. For instance, yesterday I opened one of the apps and saw 6 grocery stores available and today it’s 10! Sweet. However they seem to not be keeping the instant coffee powders that we usually get. None in fact. I’ve managed to get some Coke and then moved onto juice, mainly apple juice. Since it is so hot and humid, I’ve been quenching my thirst drinking cold juice on ice.

And also a lot of water with ice. I sweat buckets a day. We’ve been buying food atleast 1 a day. Like either curries with chappathi or if we managed to get pre-cooked chappathis from a store then I just buy curries which we tend to have some left over and use the next day for lunch or dinner. Last night was a delicious chicken sausages with pepper and onions and some onion rings with mayo & ketchup. We had that with chappatis.