Sadly when it comes to fashion our game has little in reserve

EVERY trend comes back into fashion if you wait long enough. Which is handy if you’ve been kicking around in the same clobber since the 90s.

It’s the same in Scottish football though. If you wait long enough, the stuff that wasn’t trendy a couple of years ago all of a sudden are the must-have accessory of the summer. Like the Reserve Leagues.

We’ve binned the second strings twice in the last 20 years but they keep returning like a Ben Sherman shirt and a pair of Timberland boots.

This week’s SPFL agm announced it was back for a third time ... and no doubt due to be shelved again by 2025 before returning in the 2030s.

This time we are told it’s back for the good of the game. It’s so confusing. The set-up was chucked in 1999 for the same reason. Brought back in 2004 to save us, then stuck back in the drawer again in 2009.

Eight years on and it’s rolled out for another bash. It’s hard to see why they’ve bothered. The theory is sound enough. The development league doesn’t give Under-20s enough exposure to the ”men’s game”, they say.

It’s no use just playing among their own age group as they don’t learn enough to make the jump when it’s required.

That sounds fair enough – if we were playing in the 1990s. But we’re not. Where exactly are all these big grown men who will be playing in the second strings? In case the SPFL clubs didn’t notice, they bagged most of them when the reserve league went in 2009.

Our cost-cutting clubs took hacksaws to their squads and once you get beyond the 13 or 14 first-choice men, the rest are kids – the ones who end up on the bench and get game time in the Development League.

Even the bigger sides won’t be packing their ressies with firstteamers. Rangers have a larger squad than most but have already said they’ll pick Under-18 and 19s in the Reserve League while sending their top kids out on loan or playing in friendlies against teams from England or beyond.

Celtic will continue to pick mostly kids as well as it’s tough for them to get much of a sniff of the first team. Any club’s first-team player getting a reserve runout will be on their way back from injury and in need of a stretch of the legs.

If clubs reckon having more of them around – and they already were allowed five over-agers in the Development League – then they are completely delusional.

As is this school of thought that it does the kids good to have some 35-year-old centre-half

Where exactly are all these big grown men who’ll be in the second strings?

trying to half them in two. We want to be a modern thinking football nation not go back to this dark ages nonsense.

Meanwhile, do we really think some young gun is going to get to the next level playing one game a season against Marvin Compper?

It’s another one of these Scottish football blueprints that looks okay on paper.

In reality it’s a name change rather than a sea change. And until we sort out the facilities and the coaching, and the clubs start taking a chance and putting youngsters in first teams then we’re doomed to remain in the same old cycle – and continuing to hark back to the past. A trait that never goes out of fashion in Scottish football.