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No promotion for Championship teams if season not finished, says Norwich

London, May 13 (IANS) Norwich City sporting director Stuart Webber has called for Championship sides to be not promoted to the Premier League if the football season is not completed in both divisions.

“In my opinion, it needs to be settled on the pitch, not off the pitch,” he told Sky Sports on The Football Show.

“A big question we have around restarting is, it’s fine if we restart and three teams get relegated. We look at it as though we’re only six points off 16th rather than being adrift. But if we do (go down), that’s fine, because that’s where football should be played. Football should be played on a pitch and not in the boardroom.

“But the Championship has to restart and play all their games also. What we could not accept is a situation where we play out all our games, get relegated but then the Championship can’t play — because we don’t even know if the government are going to let them play — and then they automatically promote some teams who haven’t finished the season.

“It’s a bit like saying, we can’t complete the FA Cup, but we’re in the quarter-finals, we’ve beaten a Championship top-six team away, we’ve beaten two Premier League teams away, so does that mean we win the FA Cup then and qualify for Europe and we all get a medal, because the level of games we played were harder than the other teams left in the quarter-finals?

“That’s a really important sporting point — it needs to be settled on the pitch, both coming up or going down.”

Norwich are bottom of the Premier League table at the moment, six points from safety with nine games to play.

In the Championship, which is England’s second tier, Leeds and West Brom are in the automatic promotion places.

Premier League is looking to a return to action and there could be a possibility of a curtailed season with a points-per-game system being put forward on the table for discussion as a possible method of deciding final league positions.

–IANS

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