Go-ahead forvirtual tickets
Hamilton fans will be able to cheer on their side at home games this season from their own armchairs after the SPFL agreed a ‘virtual season ticket’ deal with Sky Sports.
With games set to be played behind closed doors when the season kicks-off in August, Scottish Premiership sides will be able to live stream games to their fans and bring in much-needed matchday income.
Accies announced they will not be selling season tickets for the 2020/21 campaign, so whether they will sell the package as a whole or on a pay-per-view basis is unclear.
More details are expected soon.
Hamilton Accies chairman Allan Maitland has revealed their players won’t return to training until the beginning of July.
Some Scottish Premiership sides are bringing their squads back in this week, with the Scottish Government allowing light training to resume from today amid the easing of Covid-19 lockdown restrictions.
However, Accies won’t be following the likes of Rangers and Celtic in making a quick return to the training pitch.
Celtic and Ross County are understood to be resuming from Thursday, with Rangers following at the weekend. The likes of Aberdeen, Motherwell and Dundee United are expected to follow at the start of next week.
The new Premiership season has a provisional kick-off date of August 1, but the Accies players are a few weeks away from hitting the pitch again.
Maitland said :“I don’t envisage that we will be back training until the beginning of July. I think there’s still a long way to go to before we see things are being done right.
“From our point of view, I don’t want our club rushing into something, if we can take our time and get it right.
“At this stage, we don’t know
what the testing procedure is, we don’t know enough about it.
“I know what the procedure is for, players training etcetera, but we’ll bide our time.”
“If that means we will be learning from other people’s experiences, that’s fine, because there will be lots of things we haven’t thought about that will become a problem.
“I get that some clubs are starting back this week because some clubs have got European football to consider.
“They are going to be competing against teams who are already playing.
“You look at Rangers, they could be playing Bayer Leverkusen or they could be playing against somebody else the following week in a preliminary round, so I can understand why some teams want to come back right now.
“But for us, we will take things a bit more cautiously.”
Hamilton last kicked a ball in anger back in March when they earned a 1-0 win over Kilmarnock with 10 men, a vital victory that ensured their Premiership status when the league was called on an average points system.
Maitland believes bringing the players back now would not be in their best interests.
He added:“at this stage it’s almost impossible to imagine who you are going to be playing in friendlies in preparation.
“If the players were to come back now, they could be doing seven or eight weeks of light training or heady tennis or something.
“With all due respect, that’s not going to do them any good whatsoever.
“We need to have them in a proper, intense pre-season programme and I think four or five weeks will be more than enough for that.”