SO WHAT HAS GONE WRONG?
SPFL to probe Covid cluster as Killie call off
The SPFL have launched a formal investigation after Kilmarnock’s entire playing squad were instructed to self-isolate by Scottish Government health officials.
Six Killie players tested positive for Covid-19 over the past week, leading to the postponement of last night’s clash with Motherwell at Rugby Park.
The decision to call off the match came ultimately from the SPFL on a grim day illustrating how coronavirus is continuing to cripple the sporting calendar.
Now the governing body will carry out a probe into exactly what has gone wrong at the Ayrshire club. Kilmarnock initially carried out routine private testing on Tuesday, with three players shown to have returned positive tests. These results were subsequently confirmed by NHS Scotland.
On Thursday, a further three players also tested positive. But, at that stage, Sportsmail understands the club would still have been willing to play against Motherwell.
That decision was taken out of their hands, following a meeting yesterday morning involving club officials, NHS Ayrshire and
THE COVID-19 virus has not, as far as we know, evolved into something even more virulent. Which is just as well. Because, even without changing its molecular structure, this nasty little bug is finding new and inventive ways to mess with our daily lives.
Sport in general, and Scottish football in particular, can testify to that.
The real world, with all its uncomfortable truths, just came barrelling straight through our carefully constructed little fantasy realm. Again.
As soon as NHS Ayrshire and the local Problem Assessment Group stuck the entire Kilmarnock first-team squad in isolation for a fortnight, the Rugby Park club had no option but to inform the SPFL of their inability to fulfil last night’s fixture.
And you’d be mad to think that Killie will be the only club to suffer this fate in the weeks and months ahead.
Whatever comes out of the SPFL ‘investigation’ into the half-dozen positive tests, the decision to postpone — at least — the Motherwell game feels like a dangerous development for every club in Scotland.
If this is a sign of things to come, even playing the season out in full — without recourse to forfeits and 3-0 paper victories — begins to look like a more remote prospect.
The grown-ups, in this case public health officials genuinely horrified at the prospect of a new local flare-up, aren’t going to allow little things like fixture commitments to stay their hand.
And nobody, least of all those running Scotland’s most popular sport, believes that this will be the last catastrophic cluster to hit our professional leagues.
Now look at the season 2020-21 schedule, with its Betfred Cup group stage, European obligations, Scottish Cup ties… and minimal wiggle room.
Even before the campaign kicked off, senior SPFL figures warned that a rash of Covid call-offs would inevitably lead to teams playing every second day in a bid to catch up.
At board level, the league remain determined to have all contests decided on the field of play.
But the nightmare scenario, a situation where the SPFL board are left with no option but to punish clubs with 3-0 defeats, looms large over the decision makers.
Oh, the lower-league teams may have created a bit of space for themselves by deciding to scrap this year’s Challenge Cup competition. But it’s hard to see that being enough.
If one of the country’s elite clubs, a top-flight side presumably obeying all the rules on health and safety, can be put temporarily out of business by a relatively minor outbreak, all modelling points to more teams suffering a similar fate.
That’s not how testing is supposed to work, of course.
If we all understand that Scottish football’s biosecure bubble is nothing of the sort, given the inevitable risk of players picking up an infection from family members, the whole track-and-trace procedure was intended to contain any outbreak.
One result comes back positive, the theory goes, and the unlucky Patient Zero is ruled out for a couple of weeks.
Maybe you lose another two or three players who have been sharing a dressing room or dining area with the poor sod.
But the way this Killie cluster played out exposed dangerous flaws in the firewalls intended
to prevent the majority from becoming infected.
The full SPFL Board will meet on Monday — their usually monthly meetings have become a little more frequent of late, as you might imagine — to address the two Betfred Cup ties at risk of being affected by Kilmarnock’s extended spell in the cooler.
The Premiership side may end up playing t heir kids against Falkirk and Dunfermline. They may even face pressure to do just that.
If only because losing those group games in the very first week of the competition would hardly bode well for t hose trying to project the old League Cup, particularly in these early stages, as a relevant competition.
Football isn’ t alone in struggling to steer a safe and sensible path through an ever-changing landscape, of course.
Rugby may be as hard hit as any sport. And, over in the States, even the NFL have been forced to postpone a fixture.
Yet one of the major issues in Scotland lies in getting someone — anyone — to make a decision.
Not a recommendation. Nor merely referring clubs to a particularly complex paragraph in the latest government (which government?) ‘advice’. Between the football authorities, local authorities, She Who Must Be Obeyed at Holyrood and a variety of public health bodies, everyone’s got an opinion. And so t here have been inconsistencies, to say the least, in how our national sport has reacted to different situations. Aberdeen and Celtic were put on the naughty step by having matches postponed, although the Dons actually benefited — eventually — from that decision. St Mirren, on the other hand, were forced to go scrambling about f or an emergency loan signing after all three goalkeepers on the Paisley club’s roster were ruled out.
Hibs couldn’t even get an answer on whether to go ahead with training once Alex Gogic produced a false positive.
We’ve all heard about the rule of 13, more of a suggestion borrowed from UEFA.
Be honest, t hough. The regulation of this crisis has been all over the place. How could it be anything but?
So, sure, Killie will probably fulfil their commitments, even if they have to wait a while.
But we can’t take anything for granted. Especially not if/when other fixtures start to fall.
And this is before we even consider the potential impact of the infamous ‘circuit breaker’ option still being considered by the Scottish Government; good luck trying to negotiate football’s exemption from another near-total lockdown. As we are consistently told that these are unprecedented times, we shouldn’t accept that the Kilmarnock situation sets any more of a precedent than the Aberdeen, Celtic or Hibs cases.
‘ It’s been along couple of days,’ admitted an exhausted Kilmarnock chairman Billy Bowie yesterday.
They won’t be the last, either. That isn’t going to change for a while.