I made the point in a thread yesterday that, despite the weather, only Exeter had postponed their game for the weekend. I predicted double figure postponements, just judging by the weather forecast. At 12pm today, there was still only 1 postponement in the football league. I've just looked now, and 7 games in total were postponed due to the weather. Of the 6 that were postponed today, none of them were close geographically to each other. Without checking Google maps, I'd say Fleetwood to Lincoln was the closest journey, which itself is probably a 200 mile round trip. Its pretty poor that games weren't called off sooner, because I'm certain that at 8am this morning, you could determine whether a game would be played on a pitch or not.
Something needs to be done about this but I think the difficulty is predicted weather vs. actual weather. Obviously don't know what the deal was with all of them, but from a couple of TalkSport clips at 8am you could play a football game but by 12pm you couldn't. With how regularly the weather forecast is wrong you'd get criticised either way, but the decision definitely needs to be made earlier and there definitely needs to be some agreement between the FA/Premier League/EFL and train companies on the refund or swapping of tickets in the event of this. Salford was one game but that's not a million miles away from multiple north west games that did take place.
Blackburn had a pitch inspection at noon, and declared the game on only to have another inspection at 2.15 to call it off.
Blackburn were hit by a late morning snow storm. The ref inspected the pitch at 12 and said it was fine, they put work in to further clear it and prepare it and he called another pitch inspection at 2:15 where he called it off against the wishes of both teams. In Blackburn's defence they then offered free food to the Millwall fans for the journey home
Harrogate couldn’t be blamed for their late postponement. The weather was fine until late morning and then the sky went black and heavy snow fell for the next couple of hours. It wasn’t forecast but it came anyway. Tough on Leyton Orient. Looking out of my window now and it’s cleared dramatically. Probably thawed completely before bed time. Yesterday we had the gales, today arctic winter for a while.
That's very good of Blackburn. I do think though with the forecast, it could have been predicted that the game was always likely to be off though to be fair. Sadly, fans are an afterthought in these decisions.
Whilst we're obviously at different ends of Yorkshire, snow has been forecast around here since the middle of the week. Predictably, it started to fall around midday. It's a difficult one I agree, but I do think it could have been reasonably predicted. A couple of hours before the game was eventually called off.
