There will be one game of top-flight football in England this Easter Monday. Arsenal’s match at Middlesbrough will be just the 10th played in the Premier League on the last day of the long Easter weekend in the last 10 years, a period in which one of the most dramatic and historic dates in the fixture calendar has gradually and silently been phased out. In the decade before that there were 56 Easter Monday games among the English elite; between 1988 and 1997 there were 79.
As on the Monday, so across the entire weekend. What used to be the season’s highpoint is now another footstep in its sprint to a conclusion. There will be the standard 10 Premier League games this weekend; a decade ago there were 16, with 12 top-flight teams playing twice across the four days. Skipping back 10 years at a time, in 1987 and 1977 (all top-flight Easter games in 1997 having been cancelled to allow England to play a friendly against Mexico) there were 21, in 1967 there were 24, and in 1957 there were 31. In that last year every top-flight team squeezed three fixtures into four days, with the final two games delayed until the Tuesday to allow Birmingham, West Bromwich Albion, Wolverhampton Wanderers and Aston Villa to bring the West Midlands to a standstill.
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