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(Scottish) SPFL Play off farce ?
Topic Started: 17 Apr 2016, 12:29 AM (221 Views)
daib0
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But in Scotland, it was a totally different story exactly from the 'Fifth' League. I hadn't seen it, or understood it, till now one year ago. Here goes:



Play off farce proves that SPFL pyramid is fundamentally flawed

HIGHLANDERS Brora could be forced to turn senior and Michael says that the shambolic play-off system has turned a good idea bad.

BRORA RANGERS are within touching distance of the 
Promised Land. A couple of 
play-off matches away from joining the ranks of the Scottish Professional Football League. You’d think they would be jumping for joy. Instead, they sound like a hounded hubbie being told he’s spending Saturday afternoon getting dragged around Dunelm Mill.

John Young, the president of the Highland League’s runaway winners, summed it up with a superbly snide response to his side heading into a play-off with Edinburgh City. He said: “We’ve looked at all options but there is no way we can avoid it.”

Young couldn’t have sounded any less enthusiastic if he was picking out a pair of curtains with the Mrs. Brora will get hauled kicking and screaming into the play-offs and we all should remortgage the house, throw in the car, the wife and the dug and lump the lot on City winning before the bookies get wise. It’s a farce and it just highlights the dog’s dinner made of the 
new set up.

Brora don’t want to be in the SPFL. The are lord of their own manor in the north and joining another league is a hassle they can do without. They do just fine where they are. They have a budget that would make most SPFL lower-league clubs faint and are able to pay decent money for decent players on their patch. They would do just fine in Leagues Two and One but don’t need it.

Midweek treks to Annan have about as much appeal as getting lined up for a blind date with Grotbags’s less attractive big sister. It’s Clachnacuddin and Nairn that floats their boat and fair enough. Why would you want to go from being kings of the north to scrapping at the bottom in the south?

You can’t blame them for being reluctant to get involved but it does make a nonsense of the so-called pyramid that was heralded as a new dawn for Scottish football.

The League Two 
play-off was bolted on 
to the rule book that 
was rushed through a couple of summers ago but it wasn’t thought through properly.

The back-of-a-fag-packet 
proposals were always going to come a cropper at some point and we’ve now reached the silly stage. We’ve now got a play-off involving one side 
that doesn’t want to win it.

Meanwhile, poor Montrose are hovering over an abyss. It’s not just the Angus side’s league status in under threat – it’s their existence. They don’t even know what league they might tumble in to. Will they head to the Highland League, the Lowland League, the East of Scotland or the Dundee and District Dog and Duck Division One? It’s a shambles and a proud 
little club have been left teetering 
on the brink.

That’s the problem with this set-up – no one seems to know or have worked out the knock-on effects. It’s also why we can’t have a half-a****ed pyramid in place. We need to be all or nothing.

Either the SPFL 
remains a closed shop or we open up the whole thing 
for everyone. The latter should be the way to go. We should have a natural pyramid like in England. An all-in structure from bottom to top. The sides in the Premiership 
don’t really care. They’re all too busy fighting over the crumbs from
Sky TV’s table. But the rest of the game needs a proper shake-up. The blazers in the Highland League and juniors have had their own way for too long.

Enough is enough. Every 
club should be in the one system. They shouldn’t fear it. It could be 
a blast. We’ve got some terrific clubs in the junior and Highland League ranks. Proper clubs with big supports and big parts to play in their communities. It would be brilliant to see 
them form a proper part of the 
footballing picture instead of lurking in a parallel world. We should sort it out from top 
to bottom.

A couple of professional divisions at the top then regionalised leagues right the way down the pyramid. Ambitious clubs could rise all the way to the top while ramshackle outfits that have rested on their laurels for years would sink to a level they deserve.

The end-of-season 
play-offs among the regions would be a cracking bun fight. Clubs would be desperate to take part in them – instead of doing everything to dodge them like Dunelm Mill.








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