Liverpool legend Callaghan on how coronavirus lockdown will affect The Pools

Liverpool FC legend Ian Callaghan made the last of his record-breaking 857 appearances for the club 42 years ago on Sunday but he is still very involved in football as a member of the renowned Pools Panel.

The panel usually meets to predict football results during bad weather and allow the Pools to still have winners. But in the current crisis they have been convening for very different reasons.

Cally tells the ECHO how his role has changed during the current Coronavirus pandemic.

There are three of us who sit on the pools panel every week.

There's myself, David Sadler who used to play for Manchester United and Tony Green, who is our chairman and has been doing it for 40-odd years.

I've only been on the panel since relatively recently. Before me there was Gordon Banks, who sadly passed away last year, and Roger Hunt who retired from the panel a few years ago.

But when I started, before the pandemic, we'd all meet up at the Pools headquarters in Aintree every Thursday.

We'd get all the stats given to us for all of the clubs in action that weekend, and then we'd go through them game by game, to decide whether it would be a home win, an away win, a score draw or a no score draw.

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All three of us have played the game to a certain level (Cally was in England's World Cup winning squad) so we predict the results to the best of our ability.

There are some which catch you out, though! When Liverpool lost at Watford 3-0 I don't think any of us saw that coming, but sometimes you will see that a top team has had a little wobble and a team from lower down the table has been on a good run so sometimes we will predict an upset.

Obviously I have very strong links with Liverpool but we try to predict the results as fairly as possible to the best of our ability.

But Tony always has the final say.

It's usually a very sociable day when we meet.

We have two games to predict results for, with 49 results in each game, so it can take some time. As a result we have a bit of lunch and a good chat.

Since the coronavirus hit, though, that's all changed.

The organisers of the Pools game feared we may be heading for a lockdown so we spent a lot of time trying to get predictions in the bank, because obviously we can't go up to Aintree any more.

I'm able to get out of the house once a day, following the government guidelines, for a walk. I've been out already today. I live up in Lydiate so I can walk along by the canal there.

And my daughter drops food off for me so I'm not going to starve!

We've got a few weeks worth of predictions already made, but if the lockdown continues we'll still be able to have our discussions and make our predictions over the phone, so there's still ways we can do it.

But it's a very frustrating time. As a Liverpool fan it couldn't really have come at a worst time with us being on the brink of a first league title for 30 years.

But there are more important things than football going on in the world at the moment.

We just have to do as we're told, follow the government's guidelines and hope we can get through it.