Preston North End in Numbers: A whole new ball game

Just at the moment, the trend among professional footballers social distancing is filming themselves juggling a loo roll from one foot to another.

Someone somewhere could make a league table from the toilet roll challenge and when this is all over, present the winner with a few sheets of the soft ply as top prize.

On a serious note though, we are facing a good few weeks without football and organised sport.

The football is off until April 30 at the earliest and it seems unlikely that will be the return date.

Perhaps we will be looking later in May or early June to get going, summer football here we come.

Even if by some very small chance football was to start on May 2 – in PNE’s case at Bristol City – there would have been eight weeks between games.

That could well stretch to 10 or 12 weeks, maybe more, at the moment football and society is in the hands of this pandemic.

So this shutdown is going to be much longer than any summer break or any break caused by a harsh winter in years gone by.

A player could score in consecutive games and that is double figures of weeks apart, emphasising the seriousness of the situation.

Could we see teams having to play a friendly game or two to shake off the rust before the season gets under way? This isn’t the normal stats-laden offering you normally see in this column but these aren’t normal times.