Sweet not in favour of a void season as he wants to see Hatters stay up on merit and not luck

Town chief executive Gary Sweet has insisted he wants his side to stay in the Championship on merit this season and not because the rest of the league campaign is cancelled due to the coronavirus outbreak.

Prior to the EFL suspending the season until April 3 at the earliest this morning, the Hatters found themselves second bottom in the table, six points away from safety with nine games to play.

However, Town’s next three matches against Preston, Swansea and Leeds United have all been postponed, while there are real concerns that the season won’t be able to restart at all with the peak of the virus not hitting until May/June.

On the chances of that happening, Sweet said: “This is bigger than football and bigger than what league we’re in.

“If the season’s cancelled and started again, there’ll be a load of supporters punching the air, but it won’t be much of a saving grace for us.

“We want to stay in this league, we want to do it on merit, we think we can and should be able to do it on merit.

“We don’t want a bye, we don’t want to be lucky.

"We don’t want to be the team that’s playing everybody next year saying ‘they should have been relegated,’ that isn’t the way we want to end this season.”

Two options available to the league could be to end the season as it is, or declare the whole campaign void, with teams staying where they are.

Neither of those sit well with Sweet though, who wants the term to somehow reach a natural conclusion.

He said: “If we look at all the various scenarios, the first scenario is we cancel.

"The first downfall there is we don’t play any further games and therefore all clubs, and there are some who are worse off than us in terms of cash-flow, but all clubs then suffer and could suffer badly, so that’s not a good option.

“If you did cancel, do you take the tables as they stood?

"That would obviously be a disaster for us, but I’m not saying just for our own selves, this is a bigger issue than football and league positions, but that wouldn't be the right thing to do, I don't think.

“The secondary option would be to cancel it and start again, which would probably be a better option, even though scousers might not particularly like that.

“However, as an option, cancellation isn’t a good one.”

Meanwhile, it could be considered to move the Euro Championships back a year and continue the season into the summer.

However, this brings up its own pitfalls though according to Sweet, who added: “The other option is deferral.

"Well deferral brings a whole load of other issues because if you suspend a season and start it again once the peak is over in the virus, which it hopefully will be in the summer and government officials are saying 10 to 14 weeks to hit, the issue at that point is if we’re playing games at that stage, we’ve got another nine games to go, we’re going to be going into July most likely.

“At that point we’ll have players out of contract, the transfer window will have started, and then you’ve got to consider the impact on the players fitness into next season and how it affects next season going forward.

“So I think deferral, while we might retain some income there, I think that is also a nightmare scenario.

“My preference and I think the most responsible thing to do, even though financially it's not the best, would be to play games behind closed doors and keep the season on track as far as possible.

“I think this should have been done yesterday (Thursday) and in which case we all get to play the games when they should have been played, the season finishes.

“There is a strong argument to say that actually the quicker the season finishes the better.

"We don’t have a void season, which is a huge advantage as we don’t really want that on the copybook of football.

“The players are largely unaffected and the only problem is how you deal with the issue of football clubs being starved of cash temporarily, so that would be my preference.”