The Premier League has agreed to move games involving Arsenal and Crystal Palace in December to ease fixture congestion.<\/p>\n
Arsenal’s trip to Everton and Palace’s game at Leeds – both originally scheduled for 14:00 GMT on Sunday, 21 December – will now be played at 20:00 on Saturday, 20 December.<\/p>\n
The move means the two sides will have an extra day to prepare for their EFL Cup quarter-final on 23 December.<\/p>\n
The decision to move forward the two Premier League matches has been done after requests from both clubs.<\/p>\n
It is understood the desire for both teams to have the same recovery time before the EFL Cup tie was a factor, though television scheduling is also believed to have been a consideration.<\/p>\n
There is an acknowledgment that the 20:00 kick-off does provide travelling supporters with logistical difficulties.<\/p>\n
But the Premier League says the decision has been taken with the players’ well-being at the forefront of its mind.<\/p>\n
It said: “Player welfare is a priority for the Premier League, and we have therefore granted requests from Arsenal and Crystal Palace to move their respective fixtures.<\/p>\n
“This comes after the scheduling of matches from other competitions around Premier League fixtures without adequate player recovery time.<\/p>\n
“This is also further evidence of the impact the expanded Uefa competitions have on the domestic fixture calendar.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Premier League has agreed to move games involving Arsenal and Crystal Palace in December to ease fixture…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":278129,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[563],"tags":[64,63,596,85],"class_list":{"0":"post-278128","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-football","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-football","11":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/278128","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=278128"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/278128\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/278129"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=278128"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=278128"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=278128"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}