Bank on chaos when the second wave hits
THIRTEEN fit and available players. That’s thirteen. A one standing just to the left of a three.
Apparently, it’s all you really need to compete in the Premiership, a domestic competition that currently allows teams to make five substitutions over 90 minutes.
Specialist position, age, experience, suitability for the damned job… none of that will be taken into account. As we’ve already seen.
Just suit up, warm up and take to the field. Whatever it takes to protect the sanctity of an SPFL fixture list that, ultimately, might not survive the next serious outbreak in Scotland’s general population.
The plans put in place for massed Covid call-offs at our leading football clubs, as revealed by
Sportsmail yesterday, are unlikely to fill the average supporter with confidence.
Honestly? Microbes in the clouds of Venus could tell you how this particular shambles is likely to play out. Once again, a storm of almighty proportions is gathering on the horizon, its arrival preceded by squalls merely hinting at the chaos to come.
When this terrible tempest makes landfall in full force, even Scottish football’s locked-down, socially-distanced, closed-doors civil war of the Great Darkness will seem like a golden age of peace and enlightenment.
And everyone with an interest in the game will long for blessed bygone days of furious insults and blood-curdling threats issued in defence of ‘sporting integrity.’ You’ll remember, of course, how freely that convenient catch-all term was once bandied about the boardrooms and bar rooms of the land.
Faces turning puce with irate indignation, voices turned all the way up, football folk once placed great stock in promoting a concept conveniently twisted to suit almost any set of semi-factual claims.
The ‘right’ kind of fairness was at the heart of rows from the touchline to online, prompting endless rounds of whitabootery. Not to mention those unwanted interventions by anonymous keyboard warriors hiding behind their ‘political’ social media bios.
Ah, good times. We had a frame of reference for every new argument, at least. We knew where we stood.
But the most up-to-date thinking on Covid-related absences at SPFL member clubs? It threatens to leave teams crippled.
Taking their lead from UEFA, the league are working on the basis that any team with 13 available players will be forced to fulfil fixtures. There is definitely a sort of logic in treating a positive coronavirus test — even on an asymptomatic player — like any other injury or illness.
If others also fall by the wayside simply through association with their club’s particular Patient
Zero, well, stuff happens. Managers lose players for all sorts of mad reasons during the average season, with freak injuries and food poisoning always cited as a like-for-like comparison.
Here’s the difference, though. In a more ordinary crisis, footballers can play through a dodgy tum, a tight hamstring or even the flu.
Plenty have done it down the years, performing at 50-per-cent capacity and getting through 70 minutes on muscle memory.
With this, you’re out. Even if you subsequently test negative. Twice. No questions, no appeals, no late fitness tests on the morning of the match.
And you’ll probably take a number of team-mates with you. All because someone in the supermarket didn’t maintain a two-metre gap in the healthy eating section.
Look, we get it. There are no easy answers. Even Aberdeen and Celtic, widely cited as having ‘escaped’ a worse fate by not being forced to field weakened teams when their games were postponed, have suffered by being made to play catch-up.
But more thought must go into a system that forced St Mirren to play Hibs at the weekend.
It was a farce. And, as tight as the schedule may be, it’s a situation that must be avoided at all costs.
The only small mercy is that the rules remain on the fuzzy side of vague just now, with all those demands for ‘leadership’ from the SPFL predictably disappearing the moment they asked member clubs for the power to take decisions.
But the very lack of hard-and-fast regulations mean, inevitably, exceptions are likely to be made.
The same criteria won’t be applied across the board, then. And someone, somewhere, will get away with a generous decision.
The idea of ‘just living with it’ is all very well as a theory.
Until it’s your club fielding kids from the stiffs in four relegation battles/title deciders/European eliminators. Then watching the ‘other lot’ being gifted a weekend off.
At the moment, footballing authorities from FIFA down to the most lowly regional administrators would simply appear to be hoping that the worst doesn’t happen. At least not too often. And not to the clubs who really matter.
The advice to the ordinary also-rans who make up the bulk of the game, then?
Stay lucky.