Time to end the second chances for teams that fail
James Morgan sets you up for the week in sport
WE are slap bang in the middle of play-off season, a time of the year when attention inevitably turns to the structure of the SPFL promotion and relegation system.
Let’s be honest here, it’s too convoluted and all too typical of how we do things in this country.
For a start, there’s the name. The Premiership play-offs, yep, that contains three teams from the Championship, likewise the Championship play-offs have three teams from League One and it is a similar kind of anomaly for the League One play-offs.
Part of the reason for that, of course, seems to be a reluctance to relegate teams which by extension could be construed as a reluctance to promote certain teams.
The theory goes that an influx of too many teams from the division below will weaken the division as a whole, a kind of pulling down by the bootstraps, if you will.
Does that stand up to scrutiny? It’s hard to measure that generally held belief with any great scientific conviction, of course, because, well, because of the system that limits the potential for outliers to achieve promotion when those teams in third and fourth are faced with a play-off schedule of six matches.
Let’s take those recent additions to the top flight who came through the play-off structure as a team finishing outwith the automatic promotion place; it has invariably been the team finishing in second. Hamilton were promoted in the first season of the play-offs after a memorable win over Hibs and remained in the top flight for seven seasons.
Meanwhile, Livingston continue to fight the good fight having been promoted in 2018.
Further down the leagues, Ayr United and Cove Rangers are clubs who have demonstrated that if you are good enough you can survive – and even prosper.
History shows that the team finishing in fourth has never navigated their way to promotion so, that being the case, surely it’s high time the play-offs were either expanded to include a fourth team from the division or shortened to include just two teams and be done with giving second chances to teams in leagues above.
The confirmed relegations of Dunfermline, Dumbarton, and most probably Cowdenbeath only serve to accentuate the point.
Neil changing the mood music at Sunderland
THE Sunderland manager’s job has proved the undoing of bigger-name managers than Alex Neil. But stop and listen to the former Hamilton, Norwich and Preston boss and you will discover that he might just prove to be the panacea for the Sky Bet League One club’s problems.
“People keep telling me we are not a League One club. Yeah? Well, it is a League One club,” Neil said last week. “This is the bit that irritates me. You are in League One. If you want to talk about the infrastructure, the fan base, the stadium and are they League One standard? No, but the simple fact is that at the moment the club is a League One club.
“Unless you get a reality of where you are, you don’t know how you can get to where you want to go. That is something I have been drilling into people since I came in.”
For too long the issues at Sunderland have been staring the club in the face. An overinflated sense of their own importance has been crippling along with the idea that they have a divine right to some exalted status because it’s only five years since they were in the Premier League.
Sunderland, who won the first leg of their play-off semifinal against Sheffield Wednesday on Friday, face the same opponents tonight for a place at Wembley.
MacIntyre is golf’s real lefty
ROBERT MacINTYRE relaxes between big tournaments by looking after his siblings in his foster family and playing shinty. There can’t be many more grounded young superstars in sport than the Scot and his recent comments confirm a wise head on young shoulders and a healthy grasp of the wider world – certainly a lot more sympathetic than that of Phil Mickelson – and the state in which so many people find themselves in.
Asked whether he would be competing in next month’s LIV Golf Invitational Series in Saudi Arabia, MacIntyre said: “I won’t be there. Simple as that, I won’t be there. At the end of the day, there’s crazy, crazy money getting thrown at it. If you ask me, it’s obscene money to be throwing at sport. There’s only so much money that a human needs.”
It’s a big week for Hannah Rankin
THE 31-year-old world champion boxer – who is also a classically trained musician – will make the defence of her WBA and IBO Super-Welterweight titles against Mexico’s Alejandra Ayala at the OVO Hydro on Friday night.
Rankin’s story is incredible. She only took up the sport in 2017 and had no previous amateur experience before pulling on her gloves for the first time.
Her professional debut took place in a London nightclub but since then she has travelled the world and has beaten elite-level talents and former Olympians along the way. Her rise to global pre-eminence has been characterised by her persistence and determination to make it to the top. Not that this was a departure for Rankin – incredibly she says music is very similar to boxing.
“The discipline and training of boxing appealed to me,” she said.
“It’s just like music – it requires hours of practice. You have to be competitive and in a way it’s a chance to perform.”