THE FOOTBALL SEASON SHOULD FINISH ON THE PITCH... NOT IN A COURT

GROWING UP, football journalism always seemed a decent alternative to real work. A dog-eared copy of the Daily Record would be fished from my old man’s bag at the end of his working day and turned straight to the back page.

Journalistic heavyweights like Alex ‘Candid’ Cameron wrote fewer words on a booming Scottish game than some of us do now it’s going bust. Aberdeen and Dundee United were punching above their weight in Europe and the national team was a fixture in the World Cup finals. And the memory of those heady days makes this week feel like a slightly tragic affair.

No one goes into sports writing dreaming of the day they hunch over a Zoom call watching Garry Borland QC joust with David Thomson QC to convince Lord Clark that Hearts and Partick Thistle’s relegation should really go to an independent SFA tribunal rather a civil court.

Had Darlinda, the Record’s resident star gazer, foreseen that state of affairs all those years ago I might have listened to the guidance teachers talking up the importance of maths and physics.

No one labours under the illusion that Scottish football has

ever been the easiest watch. Yet those artificial pitches in Livingston and Hamilton are like sunlit uplands compared to an away day at the Court of Session on a wet Wednesday in July.

By rights, the domestic football campaign should end in the showpiece of the Scottish Cup final. This season, the key issues have been settled by a tedious, technical war of words where absolutely everybody is a loser.

Everybody, that is, but the lawyers racking up fees at football’s expense.

As the first Queen’s Counsel took two and a half hours to break down Article 99 of the SFA’s football dispute resolution process line the other day, a 0-0 draw in Dingwall on a Tuesday night in December had never seemed more appealing.

Nor had the mess the game finds itself in as a consequence of coronavirus ever seemed more absurd.

Forget all the tripe about Scottish football being the laughing stock of world football. By and large, the football world pays very little attention to what happens here. They’re too busy concerning themselves with the carnage Covid-19 is causing in their own countries. But that shouldn’t stop people running the game and clubs from feeling embarrassed.

When it comes to a messy and premature end to the season, everyone has picked their side. Views are bitter and entrenched.

Fans of Hearts, Partick Thistle, Rangers, Falkirk and others think the SPFL are a disreputable cabal who do what Peter Lawwell tells them.

Fans of Celtic, Dundee United, Raith Rovers and Cove Rangers, meanwhile, have emerged as unlikely champions of the football establishment.

Whoever you blame for this fiasco, one thing should be clear. The Scottish football family is now so dysfunctional that Jeremy Kyle would run a mile.

When QCs are settling relegation and promotion at the end of a season, it’s pretty obvious that the current league rules are hopeless.

In an acknowledgement of that, the SPFL Board want to seize the power to decide what happens if a second spike of Covid-19 disrupts next season. They want to stop bickering chairmen voting on the issue and adopt the mantle of an autocratic Politburo.

God knows why. If Celtic replace Rangers on the new board and start calling the shots on a league which hands them ten in a row, it’s a recipe for carnage. The board members who put their name to that would be forced to seek refuge on the witness protection programme.

That’s why it makes more sense for current SPFL directors to put together a firm set of proposals

before they stand down. If next season is disrupted after less than 50 per cent of the fixtures, tell clubs in advance how the SPFL will handle it.

If the league is halted after 75 per cent of the games, have it written in stone how promotion and relegation will play out.

Don’t leave it until doomsday comes. Do it now before clubs start peering through the cloud of self-interest.

Unless Scottish football learns from this debacle, there’s a danger we’ll all be back on Zoom next year hearing the same arguments being reheated by the same QCs on behalf of different clubs who don’t trust the SFA arbitration process. And trust me, once is enough.

The right and proper place to end a Scottish football season is on the pitch at Hampden Park. It should never be played out behind closed doors in the echo chamber of the Court of Session.