These are unprecedented times for football. I've been watching it for just short of 60 years and have never experienced a shutdown like the one we have at the moment. Of course we all want to know how long the crisis is likely to last but I don't think any of the medical experts can be sure about that. The PL and EFL may be able to resume after 1st June to finish their seasons but obviously people's health comes first.

There was a kind of "shutdown" in 1962-63, my third season of being taken to matches. It was the season of "The Big Freeze", when the weather was so bad that clubs at all levels hardly played at all between Boxing Day and the second week in March. Redhill were then in the Athenian League and manager Eric Nicholls had to make an appeal in The Surrey Mirror for help in clearing the Memorial Sports Ground of several inches of hard snow.

The problem that winter was that the temperature was never above freezing, sometimes more than ten degrees below, and the snow and ice never had a chance to melt. I saw a match down in Gosport in Hampshire on Boxing Day - we were spending Christmas with the grandparents - and my next one was an Amateur Cup First Round tie between Tooting and St Albans that was being played in March, two months after its scheduled date. It was a pretty miserable time for this eleven-year-old. The pro' clubs played when they could, invariably on snow-covered pitches, and the FA Cup's Third Round for example took an incredible 66 days to complete!

Football even carried on during the two World Wars. The Football League was suspended indefinitely five days after war was declared in 1939 but was swiftly replaced by Regional Leagues. My dad kept a record of all the games he attended and would often be writing something like "Chelsea 2 Brentford 1 - match abandoned after 80 minutes due to Air Raid Warning".

We will get through this. Let's look forward to Redhill's next fixture at the Brow.