LongTimeLurker

For the sake of argument let's call them Darvel.

2021-22 Scottish Cup entry up for grabs for the premier champion even if no licence for promotion or did that get axed at the last SFA AGM?

Here's what Jason Leitch was saying as recently as a week ago: https://www.bbc.com/sport/football/54408588 ... "I'm very mindful of the smaller clubs who could put together pretty strong mitigation to have small, distanced, local crowds and keep the vulnerable away. That will come back and I am an advocate for that but it's about timing. "We haven't had that discussion fully yet with the SPFL and Scottish FA. Should they let Annan, for example, have crowds before Rangers and Celtic? There are arguments in both directions and at some point we'll trigger that but not yet, because we're still too worried about the virus." ...

You may well know more about that than I do. All I know is that it was the original intended date for that.

Shotts BA still in but not happy campers about the promotion issue. Maybe one of the 14 changed their mind then? https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/sport/local-sport/shotts-been-absolutely-shafted-west-22827341?utm_source=twitter.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=sharebar ...Following a crisis meeting at Hannah Park today, McKeown confirmed they still currently plan on kicking off the season...

Hopefully that's been the general consensus on this. The new cases curve will peak and start to decline and good things can happen after that on spectators. Keep the show on the road as there are better days coming.

Wouldn't be 100% confident on the rights and wrongs of what The Informer (formerly East Stirling but now Darvel by the looks of things) is saying without seeing the actual wording, but having a contract with a start date in August or whatever and not playing competitively and hence making payments until April or whatever will be a difficult thing to hold players to even if the legality of it is OK, if they want to walk and start to kick up a fuss over it. Everybody else at tier 6 could easily be playing with spectators again by the turn of the year. Time to collect some popcorn and sit back and watch what unfolds, basically.

Would agree with that last sentence.

Once you play your first competitive game payments kick in and you are supposed to be protecting your club financially, you impolite so and so. Are you telling us that you still plan to play in the 2019/20 SJC then and your players are going to have to sit twiddling their thumbs not playing fitba and not getting paid until it finally suits you to play those games? Wanting to have your cake and eat it too comes to mind.

...with no subs and a makeshift team due to injuries. If the 2019/20 junior cup is still being completed, Hurlford are now in the final:

...but the LL can still easily expand to 18 so promotion is not an issue. They only have a problem on dealing with numbers if an HL club gets promoted and a LL catchment club gets relegated as that could take things to 19.

Not necessarily. All that has really changed to make it appear like things are skewing younger now is that more testing is being done on mild and asymptomatic cases compared to back in March and April. The age profile on who actually dies is unlikely to change that much.

Or it's a great opportunity for progression if you have a sugar daddy funding everything and can get a licence sorted out by late February.

Hard to see how contracts have not been broken by doing this, so players are almost certainly free to leave.

....the cases are climbing because schools, universities, workplaces, pubs and restaurants are open because we need to save the economy from crashing and continue with children's education. Life can't come to a complete standstill for what could be many years waiting for a vaccine for a virus with an IFR of only 0.2%. You have lost all sense of proportion.

Back in 1918, one of my grandfathers lost both his grandfathers in the space of a week or so to the Spanish flu. There has been a flu pandemic in relatively recent times historically that was much worse on mortality than COVID-19 has been.

Maybe stay off this thread then if reading a few sentences is too much effort. I'm not going anywhere just because you choose to behave like a moron.

....but it very much is now that football is in the cross-hairs for extra detailed regulations. The thing people need to try to grasp in all of this is that the initial fears that COVID-19 was like the bubonic plague on mortality rates proved to be unfounded. It's now in unusually bad flu year sort of territory with an average age > 80 for people that die. Even then usually with severe co-morbities rather than of COVID-19 alone. That means we definitely need to shield the elderly and the vulnerable very carefully at the moment, but we shouldn't be freaking out so much over asymptomatic cases amongst the younger generations. The decision was to open up schools, universities, workplaces, pubs, restaurants etc so that was inevitably going to happen, and is all part of an unstated strategy of not waiting for a vaccine and achieving herd immunity naturally instead because the economic cost of doing otherwise is way too drastic over something that ultimately turned out to be not much worse than the flu. If you are worried about the "second wave" so much those should be your targets rather than something relatively inconsequential in transmission terms like football done outdoors in a low risk sort of way. Making a mountain out of a molehill comes to mind as an analogy. If you do decide to generate mass hysteria over COVID-19 remember that an obsessive focus on testing for it can stop Wee Senga from getting her breast cancer screening and that could mean a young family with no mother to look after them down the road. It is arrogrant in the extreme of people to think they have a monopoly on caring for other people's welfare where this issue is concerned when they are not getting a grip on their hysteria for long enough to think rationally about all the unintended consequences like that of treating COVID-19 more seriously than it really merits.

A few pages back there is an email from Ian Maxwell sent out to Lowland Development League clubs in which he emphasises to the LL how difficult it was to get the SG to accept that all the tiers listed were really professional.

They still agreed to include the EoS and WoS in the definition of professional sport, so it is on their radar.

Exacting revenge for all the times I was ridiculed as a kid by people from Lanarkshire and Glasgow for saying things like "ah dinnae ken". The IFR isn't believed to be 2% any more, it's now believed to be about 0.2%. Lots of people wind up dying needlessly if we obsessively focus on COVID-19 at the expense of other things. Missed cancer screenings and treatment appointments etc also have consequences. Dial back the hysteria and try to be rational for a change.

if these issues are going to a majority vote why would any conference club vote for that and how could it ever get through when 47/67 are in the conferences?

Whittlets don't fit that trend and not sure Cumnock do either given the timing of their licensing application. The no promotion thing is as yet uncomfirmed.

...the real problem would be the in for a pint part but the SG in their infinite wisdom opened up the significantly higher risk part of the equation and kept the significantly lower risk one closed off.

...in an outdoor context where they would be a lot less likely to pass on the virus than they would have been indoors at the boozer last Saturday, especially if people social distanced properly and did all the sensible things on mask wearing and hand sanitising.