NORTHWICH Victoria manager Steve Wilkes is expecting Covid-19 to impact on football throughout the 2021/22 season.

He lost the services of two centre halves in different circumstances involving the pandemic in the lead up to Wednesday night's 2-2 draw against Avro in what was the team's first home game of the new North West Counties Football League campaign.

"Covid has struck," said Wilkes, speaking after the final whistle.

"Rudy Misambo had a test today and he's not been so well. Thankfully it was negative.

"But his understudy Roman Allen, a young lad who's done really well for us - his mum tested positive this morning so he has to self isolate now for 10 days.

"So we lost two centre halves and Saul Brew-Butler came in at the last minute which is tough, but these things happen.

"I think this is going to happen all season, with teams losing players on the day of games with Covid."

But Wilkes did not point at the enforced team changes as the reason why his side dropped two points in a match which they led 2-0 after 12 minutes.

"We just weren't good enough overall from start to finish," he said.

"I'm glad the referee blew when he did because we didn't play well.

"Even at 2-0 I turned round to Steve Pickup (assistant manager) and said we haven't even started yet.

"I don't know what it was, but something was missing.

"The spark wasn't there and we didn't keep the ball well enough.

"We knew it was going to be a physical battle and one or two of the players didn't stand up to that."

And, with Saturday's FA Cup extra preliminary round clash at Longridge Town in mind, he added: "Two good things happened.

"We've got a point and Lee Ashcroft the Longridge manager was here watching so he'll think we're a poor side going into Saturday's game."

Tom Schofield and Matty Birchall struck Vics' goals in the space of three minutes.

"It's always good to score a goal," said new signing Schofield, who talked of his pride in skippering the side to a 4-0 victory at Prestwich Heys in the season opener four days previous.

"Scoring goals is not really a trait of mine.

"You can't really start a match better than two goals in the opening 15 minutes, but we didn't kick on at all after that."