OPINION: Legal action is a bigger distraction than reconstruction talks

Sports Editor David Oliver wonders why clubs didn’t have time for the ‘distraction’ of reconstruction but now face the shadow of a legal challenge to the ending of last season looming large on the Scottish football agenda.
Sports Editor David Oliver. Picture: Michael Gillen.Sports Editor David Oliver. Picture: Michael Gillen.
Sports Editor David Oliver. Picture: Michael Gillen.

At the rate Scottish football is going at, they’ll be re-writing the cliches as well as the rulebook.

Football is played on the pitch, not the balance sheet is a fairly familiar one, but after the ramifications of the last few months it’s perhaps time that was changed to teams winning on the pitch, the courtroom or the boardroom.

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If Hearts, Partick Thistle, and by proxy Stranraer, are successful in their case and if there’s a compensation pay-out who pays? The clubs.

Now the counter argument from the clubs who have come out best in all of this, league winners Dundee United, Raith Rovers and Cove Rangers, are being hit in the pocket too, spending on lawyers to ‘robustly defend’ their positions and promotions.

Who chose this preposterous route which has led five members to take the game through legal proceedings and the courts? Oh, the clubs.

The reconstruction plan was there and ready to go, the least painful route for the game.

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Arguments that it ‘would be a distraction’ and ‘wasn’t the right time’ for re-alignment a few weeks and months ago certainly seem misplaced now... If it wasn’t the right time to address reconstruction in Scottish football – is now the right time to start wading through the courts?

Reconstruction was also partly rejected because some clubs might not have been able to play – lo and behold, the full 42 are all ready to sign up.

To think, the chance was there and it could all have been different – all settled with three or four re-jigged leagues and no-one significantly losing out.

Yet we’ve gone from reconstruction being a distraction from a return to action – to getting back towards action but now with a bigger, and legal, distraction looming.

That other old football cliche now seems apt – it’s a funny old game, isn’t it?