The winter shutdown is riddled with flaws
ENJOYING the winter shutdown? Revelling in relief from the tedium of top-flight football here in Scotland? Perhaps you used your first free weekend to spread what little expendable cash you could scrape together after the festivities among deserving cases in the lower leagues, the Juniors… or on an entirely different sport.
Or did you just surf the sofa for an entire weekend of the FA Cup, fighting to stay awake during games pitting vaguely familiar big-team prospects against well-travelled journeymen determined to make their mark? Come on, be honest now. Should you confess to having spent Saturday and Sunday inhaling the last box of Christmas chocolates while muttering about lucky Arsenal or cursing Jurgen Klopp for fielding a team of kids in a tournament long since devalued beyond salvation, no one here will think any less of you.
You can be forgiven for seeking almost any diversion during the next 12 days separating us from the Scottish Cup weekend intended to ease Scottish Premiership players, coaches and fans back from their ‘break’.
Because, truthfully, this shutdown — maybe not the idea, but the actual reality of how it has been squeezed into the calendar — already feels like a waste of time.
Players are absolutely knackered and need a rest, you say? Well of course they’re feeling the strain.
In order to fit in this three-week hiatus, clubs have just crammed almost a quarter of their entire season into one frantic month, desperately rushing towards January in the hope of being allowed to step off the treadmill.
Celtic shoehorned a total of nine Premiership fixtures into 29 December days. Aberdeen managed the same number of games, yet with one day’s less grace.
Every single top-flight team faced the kind of fixture pile-up that, had it been caused by a freakishly hard winter or a crazy run of cup replays, would have prompted angry demands for an end to this madness.
Yet, in the name of progress, the SPFL’s leading sides actually volunteered for last month’s insanity.
In exchange, they get a break that isn’t long enough, yet already feels too long, if that doesn’t sound too much of a contradiction.
Watching many of our clubs fill their break with friendlies, it’s worth wondering whether the players will benefit much from a breather.
And the tens of thousands of fans who’d otherwise be paying good money to watch their team last weekend and this? Stuck twiddling their thumbs, obsessively following the details of a transfer window which promises only loan signings at best or the prospect of their star player being lured to English football’s lower reaches.
Maybe we’ll all get used to it. But, as is so often the case in this nation of half measures, the shutdown already feels like a vaguely promising idea that hasn’t quite hit the mark. Nobody should be overly surprised, of course.
This is Scotland. The country that brought you a rejigged League Cup sold as summer football for the benefit of our European ambassadors — then revealed that teams who qualify for UEFA competitions wouldn’t be involved in those early group stages.
In the longer term, fans have been screaming for a larger top division for decades now. It’s never going to happen. Not without someone in power finding a way to completely counteract whatever positive effects expansion might bring.
Looking at their current modus operandi, it’s almost as if they’re deliberately sabotaging any new ‘radical’ idea, building in faults that guarantee failure.
It already feels like a vaguely promising idea that has failed to hit the mark