Carling Cup Postponements Epitomise World Football in the New Decade

Thanks to the unforgiving, brutal weather currently victimising certain areas of England, the Carling Cup semifinal clash between Manchester City and Manchester United, as well as the one between Aston Villa and Blackburn Rovers, has been postponed.

Heavy snowfall in the English county of Lancashire has prevented both highly anticipated clashes from proceeding as scheduled.

Also, in Staffordshire, where Stoke City host Fulham in the first Premier League match of the new decade, heavy snow threatened (but ultimately failed) to disrupt the encounter from going ahead as planned.

In England, this severe weather is perhaps symbolic of the new decade, and these fixtures which fell victim to the snowfall could epitomise the new decade of English football.

This is because, whether people choose to accept the scientific evidence or not, the effects of global warming could well be upon us within the next 10 years.

Without going into all the science of this controversial topic, severe weather is a byproduct of the world's rising temperatures as we all know, and where sport is concerned, as you can imagine this could potentially cause anarchy!

OK, perhaps not the ideals of anarchy, but you get the idea; it could revolutionise the fixture format and tournaments as we know them.

If more of the aforementioned weather occurs, more sporting events (in this case football matches) will be postponed and potentially cancelled.

So Tuesday's Carling Cup postponements could be an indicator of the nature of English football in this new decade, i.e. more and more matches being postponed.

And the effect that will have on the footballing season? It could very well reshape the whole infrastructure of the Premier League, FA Cup, and Carling Cup.

Undoubtedly, this would also affect European football; the Serie A, La Liga, and all the other European leagues, as well as the UEFA Champions League, UEFA Europa League, etc.

Severe weather will affect more than just England, of course, as it will encompass the whole world, so the above ideas should be translated to football all over the globe.

If the quality of decent weather declines over the following few years, the introduction of elite-level club football being played indoors might also become a real possibility.

Well, "indoors" meaning a fitted roof, constructed on the stadia of all top-flight and second-division football clubs, utilised whilst the match is taking place to prevent severe weather from having its usual crippling effect.

Of course, this grandiose idea probably wouldn't be a viable option in the lower leagues; therefore, specialised indoor football arenas could be created instead for professional football in England as we know it.

But without delving too deep into that option, which one shouldn't rule out from occurring in the decade after this one, the main theme of English and world football in 2010 and beyond is that more postponements than ever are likely to occur.

And this, logically, will epitomise the new decade of football—a revolution in the footballing infrastructure.