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Chatham boss Scott Lindsey is confident that the Southern Counties East League season can be concluded.
The league announced they won’t play again until January 16 last week but new Tier 4 restrictions in Kent and the South East means that they now need to wait for government to give them the green light again.
Chatham have played 11 Premier Division matches which means they have 29 left to complete. The season is due to finish on May 15 – it’s a tight schedule but Lindsey believes that where there’s a will, there’s a way.
“I’m pretty confident the season will finish,” he stated. “The league have come out in their statement and said they are planning for the season to finish two weeks into May which is longer than usual.
“They can squeeze the fixtures in during that timescale, even if it means we’re playing twice a week. If there’s another lockdown or this one gets extended then maybe they can extend the season to the end of May.
“We just don’t know what is going to happen in the world. No-one would have ever predicted this in a million years.”
Lindsey is going to use the time in Tier 4 restrictions to good effect, however, keeping in touch with his squad via zoom and still doing plenty of analysis work.
“We’ve got to be as prepared as we can be and get back to normal as soon as possible,” he added.
“It’s a case of being as thorough as we can. We’ll actually do more work as a staff this lockdown if we can.
“We’ve got to make sure they are doing their training schedules, and we’ll analyse the clips from games and then go through them with the players remotely as well.
“There’s a lot of managers who will down tools and there’s not a lot they can do. I’m going to use the time productively, it’s difficult to do it all remotely but we’ll try.”
Lindsey will be hoping Chats return to action with a spring in their step.
They were flying earlier in the season when the second national lockdown halted that momentum at the start of November.
The FA’s ridiculous timing of re-starting the FA Vase days after that lockdown ended did no-one any favours and Lindsey will hope they can quickly rediscover their form when games resume again.
“It’s been an incredible season,” he added. “I’ve mentioned it before that if you are successful in a cup or the league this season then you deserve a medal the size of a dustbin lid.
“It’s incredibly difficult from a managerial point of view.
“Before the second lockdown in the season we were in a really good place, we’d beaten Hollands & Blair and our next game was against Corinthian and we were confident that we could have done a job on them.
“The season got disrupted again and you have to work hard behind the scenes to get the squad organised.
“We had one training session after a gap of four weeks and then played the FA Vase game on the Saturday which was outrageous. It’s been difficult and then we had a two-week lay-off before the next game on Saturday.”
