‘Business as normal’ for Livingston next week, insists Holt
LIVINGSTON boss Gary Holt has revealed his players will report for duty as normal on Monday morning amid the continued uncertainty of Scottish football’s coronavirus shutdown.
Holt gave his players the weekend off after the SFA and SPFL joint response group confirmed the postponement of all fixtures ‘until further notice’.
That meant Livvy’s fixture against Hearts, which was due to take place today, fell by the wayside, while all games previously scheduled for the upcoming midweek will not take place.
However, with no specific date for the hiatus to be lifted or re-examined, Holt insists he must prepare for next Saturday’s Premiership fixture against Aberdeen — while also seeking to mitigate what could be a lengthy period of inactivity.
He said: ‘We will be in as normal next week because, as it stands, we don’t know that the game against Aberdeen won’t go ahead. That’s a problem.
‘I told the players: “You are off for the weekend, but I’ll see you on Monday”.
‘The boys all know they need to keep ticking over, they are professional enough to know they have targets to hit, can do stuff on their own, need to do certain weights and keep working.
‘You can’t just sit in the house and do nothing. It might come to that but, until it does, we’ll have plans in place to mitigate any lack of activity.’
Holt, whose Livvy side are chasing top-six football and could even feature in the race for Europe, is hopeful the Scottish football calendar could still be played to a finish by June, despite the latest developments.
He reckons a gruelling spell of fixture congestion — even if matches must ultimately be played behind closed doors — could clear the backlog.
He continued: ‘Say, for example, we can get back to playing by April 3 — the date set by the English Premier League — and need togo Saturday Wednesday-Saturday Wednesday to get the league done, so be it.
‘We do it in December. We play eight or nine games and everybody says: “This is great”.
‘People are saying: “Oh, we’ll still be playing in June”. Why? If you cram the games in and everyone accepts those procedures, get on with it.’
Meanwhile, Holt is adamant the local communities must stay together in the face of a national health crisis which could prove financially devastating to businesses across the board, not just football clubs.
He added: ‘We all have to come together and help one another. We’ve seen airlines struggling already — massive corporations — so what do you think the local barbers or other smaller places are going through?
‘This is a point where we see if we really are a good community, a good country, that looks out for one another.
‘Or are we a country that just says: “I’m all right, so that’s all that matters?”
‘We need to see the bigger picture in all this because it’s going to have a massive knock-on effect on all walks of life.’