It’s time we all strike a deal if our clubs are to avoid a hard Brexit
Last time I looked, the football calendar in Scotland hadn’t changed in a decade.
So why do we always wake up for the start of the European season blinking in the sunlight like toddlers on the first day of school?
Surely we’re time-served enough now that it shouldn’t be a shock to our system. But the bottom line is the powers that be in the game still don’t do enough to help our teams deal with what lies ahead.
We need success at this level. We need the cachet it brings, we need it for our sense of self-worth. And we should all be buying into doing whatever we can to help.
It’s 20 years since I played in Europe with Kilmarnock but our games were in August. Now July is the new August. And in terms of prep, June is the
new recover and the clubs more time to put a strategy in place for recruitment and preparation.
If that means playing more midweeks at the start of the season when weather and pitches are better, fine. Let’s do it.
To be fair, Celtic and Rangers use their experience of it and their resources to get through these games most of the time. What we need is our other teams to be able to deal with it better.
Killie went to the Czech Republic to play Sigma Olomouc and were all over the place. The hotel food was a disaster so we ended up at McDonald’s for our pre-match as at least we knew what we were getting. And they were smart enough to play us at two in the afternoon in 100-degree heat. You can imagine how a ginger lad f rom Ay rshi re coped.
We also went to Reykjavik in the summer when the sun never goes down and were wondering why we couldn’t sleep. You have to get it wrong to understand how to get it right sometimes.
We should know better than we did back then.
But the whole game should take responsibility for helping our teams get through the early rounds.
We know what the weather is like, we know when we should want the season to start and finish, so why can’t we sit down and figure a way to make it all fit?
Can we get to the point where if one of our teams gets into the knockout rounds, we can help?
Can we cancel a game to give them an advantage?
I’m a Killie fan. But I’m also a Scottish football fan and I’d be more than wi l l ing to accommodate Celtic, Rangers, Aberdeen, Hearts or whoever if it meant them getting a better chance to progress in Europe.