Men’s football resumes this month, with Blues fans dividing their interest between FA Cup and Premier League.

Looking back to Saturday 21 March seems as far removed from real life as watching scratchy black-and-white First World War footage, but that was the day Chelsea should have travelled to Leicester for a lunchtime FA Cup quarter-final.

Potentially, the Blues may have three extra games on top of the league catch-up, should they make it to the final on 1 August.

Spectator-free Premier League games resume on 17 June, with Chelsea first in action on the weekend of 20/21 June, and each match on the telly.

For fans, the Covid-19 closure of pubs makes the season’s resumption doubly difficult. Unless you have home access to Sky, BT and Amazon Prime, you’ll struggle to watch the games, and there’ll be none of the amiable hugging of complete strangers in the Black Lion, when Tammy Abraham scores, that has become a feature of Surbiton life.

A handful of hacks will be allowed in to matches, but the supporters, hot-dog vendors, programme sellers, ticket touts and stallholders selling scarves that make Frank Lampard look like Al Capone will be missing from the matchday pageantry.

We’ll be able to admire Chelsea youngsters’ nimble footwork, and the silky skills of N’Golo Kante, now back in training. But the spectre remains of the fear of a second wave of coronavirus. It is only a week since a Fulham player tested positive.

For now, expect footballers in echoey stadiums, where every shouted instruction from the bench and every “Oi, over here” to team-mates is crystal-clear. In other words, much like watching Arsenal at home.

Meanwhile, the decision to abandon the Women’s Super League season and refocus on a resumption of play in August has come under fire from the shadow sports minister.

Alison McGovern fears that the women’s game might get left behind when the Premier League and Championship resume in mid-June, with matches given real television prominence.

She believes that had the women’s top flight played out to a conclusion, with terrestrial TV coverage, it would have built on the momentum the game had built since last summer’s World Cup, and she argues that it’s a wasted chance to recruit more supporters – a point of view that many at Kingsmeadow, where Chelsea Women play, share.