Gary Taylor-Fletcher column: Halting the season further should not have come as a surprise

It’s what needed to be done, as we all know there’s not going to be any football played for a while.

Suspending the games and resuming when it’s safe to do so is the safest option, but at the moment they’ve got to be sensible.

It was good to see the Premier League advance £125m in funds to clubs in the EFL and the National League to help them get through these tough times.

Yes, it’s money they were going to get in the future anyway but at least, in the short term, they’re financially safe and can carry on.

It’s brilliant from the Premier League to forward that cash on.

Can they do a little bit more? We don’t know. But we’ll probably hear more about it in the next few days and the next few weeks.

When it comes to players taking a pay cut, especially those at Premier League clubs, what people have got to realise is that these things were probably already being talked about before the criticism started to come their way – especially on social media.

A Premier League player might be on £100,000 a week, for example, but they’ve got to pay 45 per cent of that in tax, so it’s not as simple as that.

You’ve got to speak to the tax people, or the PFA should be doing that on their behalf, and coming to some sort of agreement where they can donate some cash.

There’s all sorts of things that need to be taken into consideration, it’s not just a case of taking a pay cut immediately and that’s it.

I’ve not had much dealings with the PFA myself, other than the time Karl Oyston was refusing to pay the players at Blackpool our bonuses when we went up to the Premier League.

I was the player delegating and dealing with it all. Karl was talking about putting the money in our pensions so we couldn’t get it until we were 55 or maybe even 65.

From the squad we had at that time, none of us had been at big clubs or anything, so we all wanted that money to do things – buy houses and things like that.

A lot of us had planned to do things like that but then all of a sudden Karl was saying ‘no, we’re going to put the money in your pension’.

We obviously told him straight that wasn’t going to happen, but it took me about six or seven meetings with Karl and the PFA to get it sorted.

It was only on the night of the first game of the season that it was eventually resolved.

The PFA were there to give advice on what I needed to say and do, but in the end it was just a case of Karl waiting for the Premier League payments to come through.

If he had said that at the beginning, it probably wouldn’t have caused all the uproar and all the uncertainty it did among the players.

At the time, that’s what he wanted to say and how we wanted to deal with it, but we did what we needed to do.

We’ve recently seen a lot of non-playing staff at Premier League clubs being furloughed, which has caused a lot of debate.

You’d like to think most of the clubs at that level wouldn’t require that financial support and assistance, you’d think it would be the clubs lower down at League One and League Two level that would need help from the government.

With all this money coming in from Sky Sports, you’d think Premier League and Championship clubs would have enough cash to get them through it.

But you don’t know what these owners are thinking or what they want.

It’s been great to see footballers getting together and doing whatever they can, whether it be the Premier League donating £20m to the NHS or Marcus Rashford helping people in Manchester.

It’s always been the case that footballers will look to help in any way they can, doing charity events and raising money.

A lot of it probably does go unpublished because the people don’t want the limelight from it.

It’s probably because of that that the Premier League players have decided to come out now and talk about what they’re going to do to help.

It’s been reported that Liverpool captain Jordan Henderson had contacted the skippers from all 20 Premier League clubs, trying to organise something.

That says a lot about the man but it doesn’t surprise me. He’s been magnificent for Liverpool on and off the pitch and has really taken to the captain’s role.

Even with England, he wasn’t involved with the incident between Raheem Sterling and Joe Gomez but he was the one who tried to resolve it.

He managed to get it all sorted over the phone and I know all about the stuff he’s doing behind the scenes at Liverpool, which has really paid off. He’s an impressive leader.