Leitch applauds clubs in spite of woes over tests

JASON LEITCH has handed Scottish football’s testing procedures high praise, despite the succession of problems to beset the system in recent days.

The National Clinical Director awarded the top flight’s efforts a mark of ‘eight or nine’ out of 10 with a week to go before the Premiership kicks off.

Coronavirus tests will be ramped up to twice a week for players and staff in the countdown to the season’s opening day, following talks between Hampden and the Scottish Government on Friday.

And the SFA are exploring an improvement to guidelines and sanctions that may be imposed for breaching them after issues resulted in delayed and cancelled pre-season fixtures.

The SPFL and SFA’s joint response group has written to Rangers, Motherwell and Hibernian requesting answers over the events which contributed to those incidents.

St Mirren, meanwhile, have undertaken their own investigation into seven of their coaching staff testing positive, only for NHS screening to decree that six of them were false positives.

The one backroom member confirmed positive has been in strict isolation since last Saturday but so far has not displayed any virus symptoms.

Leitch believes none of this should prove an impediment to 2020/21 commencing next weekend with a full card of fixtures.

‘It’s an important week for Scottish football and there’s good news and bad news,’ said Leitch on BBC’s Sportsound.

‘The bad news was there was a positive case in a football club. Not a player but a member of backroom staff tested positive in the routine testing at St Mirren.

‘That’s three or four in the last few weeks. That person is isolating with their household, all the other things are in place.

‘There were a number of other what we now know were false positives. We re-tested them using the NHS testing.

‘The good news is that the system is working. We don’t expect to go through the whole football season with no positive cases.

‘That was probably too much to hope for. The clubs are having a good long look — at St Mirren and some other elements this week — and we are still hopeful that won’t be too much of a setback.

‘A couple of friendly games had to be called off but hopefully, all being well, the league can start on the 1st.

‘They are doing well. They are catching the positives. We’ve had a bit of a hiccup that we’ve already explained.

‘But they were very quick to act. We’ve spoken to Neil Doncaster, I spoke with John MacLean who is the senior doctor at the SFA who has been very engaged in the whole process.

‘Clearly there is some work to do behind the scenes but, in the main, the system has worked pretty well.

‘We’re back up to testing everyone twice a week to try and keep these bubbles secure.’

St Mirren were slated to take on St Johnstone in a friendly yesterday before its cancellation and are due to host Livingston in Saturday’s league kick-off.

The players and the unaffected coaching staff are all expected to return to training tomorrow and the club is confident the season opener at the weekend will proceed as planned.

There is a sense of relief that the situation is not as critical as initially feared, although concerns remain over the effectiveness of the testing process.

Hibs scrapped a friendly with Ross County last weekend.

There was a two-hour delay to Rangers v Motherwell in midweek as test results had not come through and the Ibrox club’s use of fringe players in a game against Dundee United earlier that day is also the focus of scrutiny with regards to when their results came through.

Motherwell have explained their delays rested with the testing company.