LongTimeLurker

Just as pretending the SCC is worthless is offbase, so is this. If you are in a wee town or village in Ayrshire or West Lothian there have always been a lot of people who only really pay close attention to their local junior club when the SJC or a big local derby is involved and the rest of the time tend to mainly pay attention to one of the Old Firm or another SPFL club. Good luck transferring that sort interest to the SCC any time soon when you first have to explain what it is because a lot of people are still largely unfamiliar with the Lowland League. Good luck getting 5000+ out for the SCC final and live coverage on BBC Alba when it isn't nationally branded. It makes sense to merge the two together to keep that going rather than try to kill the SJC due to ongoing mania some people have over the grade concept.

Guess we'll get a few more years of people pretending that either the SCC or SJC is an irrelevance in threads like this until common sense finally prevails and they are merged once the tribalists on both sides have finally started to move beyond the junior vs senior thing.

There's a good chance that something close to herd immunity has already been achieved in the UK even without a vaccine due to the very substantial first wave that already happened and cross-immunity that a lot of people appear to possess from having been infected by other coronaviruses. That isn't the story that keeps people hooked to news broadcasts and politicians are terrified of getting blamed for a huge second wave that kills a lot of people, so the information that supports that point of view is not being highlighted as much as the shrill alarmism that suggests otherwise. I strongly suspect based on information that can be readily accessed via twitter and google that we'll be more or less back to normal by the turn of the year, but can understand why Nicola Sturgeon and Boris Johnson wouldn't want to stake their careers on it by being more gung ho on lifting restrictions and are playing things very safe.

Burnieman would probably have had English language comprehension difficulties in that regard, if he were still around. In reality I made no such suggestion. All I stated is that it looks very convenient given the spectacularly long odds on it happening and how beneficial it is for generating interest in early rounds of a tournament that is completely new to most people in the west.

Appreciate the effort from DD, but this is a wee bit easier to follow:

Of course it's not unprecedented but when it's very much the tie of the round rather than something not particularly noteworthy like Vale of Clyde vs Lochore Welfare and when some of the visiting team's supporters would otherwise be moaning on and on in this thread about what a waste of time it is having to go to Lochar Thistle or whoever in an unnecessary diddy cup against glorified boys clubs or whatever, the powers that be at LL HQ are at the very least likely to be laughing up their sleeves that this would happen and quietly hoping that Kelty give them a severe doing this time.

Odds of that happening two years running are unlikely enough to make it look very convenient in terms of highlighting the significance of the competition.

First team I've bothered watching for a while. Just doesn't look like Scotland with no white shorts and red socks, but maybe that keeps the Family von Trapp brigade happy. Although there's some genuine quality in the team again that can play the modern possession orientated style of game reasonably well there's nothing up front.

There was a football equivalent before WWII: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Caledonians_F.C. Didn't reemerge after the war in a St Bernards and Kings Park sort of way.

No way can they do 38 league games in time for a playoff with the EoS and SoS with no floodlights available in many cases. The South Challenge Cup may only be a round or two during the normal league season with the balance played after the league seasons judging from what has been posted elsewhere, so if they go for a 19 game league format for the top WoS division there could be more spare Saturdays this season for the "holy grail" than would normally have been the case. The conferences won't need to be completed in time for a playoff with champions from other leagues, so they have more flexibility in that context.

A lot of the restrictions we have now are about stopping hypochondriacs from flipping their lids in huge numbers as much as anything else as that means losing votes at the next election. It isn't being driven by rationality a lot of the time.

Hard to believe that some people still don't grasp the implications of 53 out of 67 WoS clubs being SJFA members and the entire north region being on the verge of tier 6 pyramid entry, i.e. you can now be junior and senior at the same time making the distinction largely meaningless. Being junior revolves around entry into a nonleague national cup competition similar to the FA Trophy or FA Vase in England something many/most pyramid enthusiasts have always wanted in a Scottish context. Time for people to finally turn the page on this stuff and start to move on.

Check out what has happened on daily deaths for a clear picture of the real trend on COVID infections: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/uk/ New case numbers are a misleading measure of what's happening because you had to have severe symptoms to get tested back when the main peak was happening. Now a far larger percentage of new infections are being diagnosed. Unless Nicola S goes completely mental there should be a season.

That's what an ignore list is for. Clearly not playing with a full deck, so more to be pitied than scorned, in my opinion. Will take a while for some people to adjust to the new reality that clubs can be junior (an SJFA member entering the Junior Cup) and senior (part of the pyramid) at the same time.

What was posted the last time this came up:

Appreciate the effort put into this and if there is a system used widely elsewhere that's being applied then it's more than just some random fantasy list. Having said that though I'm not sure Albion Rovers winding up as low as 76th and Auchinleck Talbot as high as 16th means anything other than there being too small a sample of games played between SPFL clubs and nonleague teams to prevent strange outlier effects.

I normally wouldn't respond to an RJ post but some of the content here looks like blatant fake news. There has been no further information on the progress of the applications made by Cumnock and the other west region club as far as I am aware. Note what Dunbar United said above about the application only initiating the process and how several years can elapse between the initial application and the licence being granted.

The chronology on that makes no difference to the question of whether the SFA board started to actively intervene behind the scenes before the first meeting between the LL and the clubs to make sure that the WoS unfolded in a way that the west region blazers were comfortable with rather than as an outright breakaway from the west region and the SJFA. At one point there was even talk of legal action and rival proposals going to the SFA's AGM, so initially the west region were very unhappy about what the LL were doing. https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/ayrshire/scottish-junior-football-chiefs-hint-21601673 SJFA chiefs have hinted at taking action 'outside of the football authorities' if a proposed breakaway West of Scotland League leaves some Junior clubs in limbo. John Fyfe, Interim General Secretary of the West Region, makes the admission - which suggests the issue could be dragged through the courts - in a memo sent out to member clubs tonight. The missive reveals how recent talks held with the Lowland League over finding a 'mutually beneficial solution' to entering the SFA pyramid failed... ...Following the Scottish Junior F.A. statement of the 14th February 2020, the West Junior F.A. would confirm their direct engagement with George Fraser Chairman of the Lowland League. A meeting was held on Wednesday 19th February where the WJFA representatives presented a number of proposals for the Lowland League to consider in order to open up further meaningful discussions in order to reach a mutually beneficial solution. It is with bitter disappointment that we report our proposals have been rejected. We see the WJFA structure as a perfect bespoke solution to meet the Lowland League plans for the creation of a West of Scotland League which would fill the Pyramid void in the geographical West of the country...

If Kelty are letting the cat out of the bag on a 32 game league season being the plan, the cup competitions must already be a goner. No way can a 140+ entrant SCC be played alongside that given many of the participants don't have floodlights.

The SFA board seem to have had the attitude that once the SJFA AGM voted for pyramid entry the three junior regions should have simply slotted in pretty much as is at tier 6. All the SJFA actually really does is run the Junior Cup, so that's what junior football really all revolved around, having a national nonleague cup competition which is something the nonleague seniors didn't have. Previously the choice was pyramid or "holy grail". If/when it becomes clearly established that you can play in the Scottish Junior Cup and the senior grade's pyramid at one and the same time, it's not safe to assume that the South Challenge Cup would automatically be the winner if the present day EoS clubs got to choose whether to have the SJC or SCC as their main prestige nonleague cup competition. Most EoS clubs are now from a recent east region background and many were less than 100% gung ho about pyramid entry. In another 5 to 10 years the LL will probably also be majority ex-junior club. League and association constitutions can be amended by majority vote. The south pyramid may have started out as mainly a Spartans and other old EoS premier endeavour but it can now be actively retrofitted to be more in tune with the traditions of junior football where having a national nonleague cup competition is concerned.

For the sake of argument let's call them Fort William, who are notorious for that. Midweek games there are not easy for the other clubs. The HL needs to give itself plenty of flexibility if it is losing the good weather part of the season that could normally be used to make sure many of the longest distance fixtures get sorted out before the postponements start. The LL doesn't face anything like the same challenges.

The two new leading officeholders announced are from the west, so the 50 or 53 clubs from the former west region that are still members clearly have a large say within the SJFA. Worth bearing in mind that the SJFA's role is primarily to run the Junior Cup and the latter stages of that competition have been very much dominated by the west region in recent seasons, while the north region has not been much of a factor beyond the first couple of rounds for at least 50 years. An obvious question to ponder is what happens to WoS participation in the South Challenge Cup once the WoS elects its own officeholders and is no longer being administered by the LL. If they voted collectively to prioritise the Junior Cup instead is there anything that could actually be done about it by the LL and EoS, if the SFA board didn't care (as was the case previously with the short-lived North Challenge Cup)? If the EoS can unilaterally add clubs from north of the Tay Bridge boundary into the pyramid based only on a membership vote and could give Clydebank provisional membership a couple of years back, what happens if the WoS unilaterally decides it can welcome West Lothian clubs to the pyramid party in a similar sort of way? Best to wait and see what unfolds over the next few years rather than assuming the SJFA is a relic of the past clung to by a few crazed Luddites that will inevitably disappear. Now all 63 west region clubs are in the pyramid, the EoS and LL have a lot less leverage over what happens next than they had previously. There needed to be a small breakaway WoS leaving a rump west region behind in the SJFA for the south pyramid to still be following a trajectory in which there was definitely no future role for the SJFA. That's not what happened and Burnieman and co were not happy about it at the time.

Oops thought you were the guy from Bristol when I responded to that.

Nickname used for Rangers based on the name of a holding company that was involved when their previous holding company got liquidated a few years back. Many fans of other clubs are obsessed with the idea that this makes them a new club with no claim on earlier titles and Honours. The SFA and UEFA think otherwise though.

Why would west region people still be getting the top jobs in SJFA terms, if the WoS was the end of the road for the juniors in the west? Once the WoS elects its own officeholders "the pirate league" could effectively be the west region again. The former west region fixture secretary already appears to be on board in the new set up with a view to a future elected position in that role in a WoS context.