Oddly enough, within 24 hours of Johnson announcing that his government did not believe the time was yet right to suspend football matches, football had gone ahead and suspended itself. It turned out that, whatever "the science" was telling Johnson, the players were not excited about the part earmarked for them in his government's grand experiment.

As Wayne Rooney put it in a forceful column for the Sunday Times: "I was thinking, `I don't want to travel, I don't want to play, I don't want to put my family at risk or for fans to be at risk.' . . . it almost felt like footballers in England were being treated like guinea pigs. The rest of sport . . . was closing down and we were being told to carry on. I think a lot of footballers were wondering, `Is it something to do with money being involved in this?' "

Not that you would have guessed that players were nursing such fears last week when the PFA - the union that is supposed to represent the interests of professional players - issued new coronavirus guidelines. Among the pearls of advice dispensed: players should not share water bottles, towels or bathrobes with colleagues, and they should avoid eating in the dressing room. The PFA published this ludicrous document last Wednesday, at a time when the equivalent unions in Italy and Spain had already demanded the suspension of all football in those countries for the protection of their members.

But the PFA marches to the beat of a different drum; this is England. A country where, in an article published on March 3rd, Jeremy Warner, an associate editor at the Daily Telegraph, said the quiet part loud: "Not to put too fine a point on it, from an entirely disinterested economic perspective, the Covid-19 might even prove mildly beneficial in the long term by disproportionately culling elderly dependents."

The truly fantastic thing about this sentence is that the writer can describe as "entirely disinterested" the view that it might be good if dependent old people were "culled", and doesn't notice a problem. Maybe Moloch's mistake was to appear as a horned demon wreathed in fire and smoke - the presentation made it too obvious he wasn't a good guy. Had he only thought to express himself in the mild tones of a broadsheet business columnist he might even have been able to sell his demands for human sacrifice as "entirely disinterested".