LongTimeLurker

The SFA is ultimately only the member clubs and associations acting together according to its written constitution and its Board only has certain powers delegated to it to run day to day affairs between AGMs. Any major decision involving the clubs and leagues rather than the national teams is taken by the clubs and leagues involved. Last season's saga with SJFA entry has demonstrated clearly that the Board cannot dictate its preferred outcome where the pyramid is concerned. The sooner people grasp that the quicker further progress is likely to be.

ICT are licensed, so not sure that holds up to scrutiny.

There's sanctions imposed on Syria as well, which greatly complicates what any company that operates in western countries can do there. Trump is always claimed to be pro-Russian and isolationist but his foreign policy postures have been very pro-Zioinst and very much a continuation of Bush era neo-Con postures.

Very much underreported is the extent to which the Americans are following a Saudi and Israeli agenda against the Iranians at the moment after Obama and the EU had done the opposite to weaken the Saudi grip on the oil market. One of side effects of that is that the government controlled portion of Syria has a massive fuel crisis because the Iranians can't supply them with oil by sea through the Suez canal, which also undermines the Russian foreign policy in a big way.

No Deal is still the default outcome and that's not good when a nutter like BoJo has his hands on the controls and can't easily be ousted through a confidence motion with TBP so high in the opinion polls. Corbyn's cynical antics have squandered many opportunities to avoid that outcome when it was a lot more achievable.

The SFA has no power to dictate an outcome on this in terms of their constitution. If they did the east and west superleagues would already be in at tier 6 for next season. The PWG is either going to have to come up with a compromise or the LL is probably going to have to adopt a Borg from Star Trek approach to get clubs from the west on board by adding extra tiers.

The appalling era was what followed under Maggie T. Deliberately engineered mass unemployment and deindustrialisation to put the plebs back in their place.

That's a snippet that may be of interest to some.

...which is why in a nutshell it's probably easier in procedural terms at this point to expand the LL by adding extra feeder tiers.

Think it was more the end of series 6 with the absurd chase scene through Braavos, series 7 and episodes 3 and 4 of series 8 where the quality of the writing took a severe nose dive. The ending would have been fine if they had done a better job between the end of the book material and GRRM's preferred conclusion. Think where they really messed up was on not having the Golden Company invade the Stormlands with the alleged Aegon Targaryen from Essos. Cersei and Jaime lingered on in the story a lot longer than they probably do in the yet to be released books where Cersei is shown to be completely inept at ruling making the timing ripe for a successful invasion. Varys's role in the plot would also have made much more sense, if it had been clear he was secretly working for the alleged Aegon and completely undermining whoever held power in King's Landing rather than idealistically serving the realm.

Wouldn't have guessed that NI's place in the Union is more important to them than Scotland's.

Thanks for that. I vaguely remembered the name Willie Gardiner from stuff my grandfather used to talk about a lot back in the 70s. A Bo'ness United and Rangers angle would have been right up his street.

It's already happened with Cove Rangers and much more pedantically Edinburgh City.

Part of the problem might be that the current president of the WRSJFA is from Clydebank.

...or maybe you don't understand my point? What difference does it make to the teams involved if the existing EoS Premier gets rebranded as LL2 East and the existing conferences become the LL3 East or whatever? At that point the ERSJFA is left negotiating entry as tier 8 or 9 through the PWG. In the West all the clubs that want to leave the SJFA for the pyramid could form an LL2 west and LL3 west etc leaving what's left of the WRSJFA negotiating entry below that in a similar sort of way.

...because it may be a lot easier to do than starting a WoSFL.

Did Willie Gardiner later sign for Rangers and play for Leicester? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willie_Gardiner

You could effectively merge the LL and EoS and add all the junior clubs in the west that want to join to lower tiers of the LL. Then the remaining juniors in the east and west could be at tier 9 or whatever with Tom Johnston still droning on about 250k toilet blocks. Only slight complication is how to handle the SoS League.

An LL2 east and west at tier 6 would provide a way around a lot of the blazer related politics. There's no obvious reason why there couldn't be an LL3 east and west as well if numbers in the west justified it.

It's not the old EoS Premier any more. There are now probably five clubs on board with significantly higher budgets, so they may well have lost out on the dream of SPFL entry after doing so much of the legwork on getting the pyramid going. Very decent of them to groundshare with Edinburgh City under the circumstances, if they had the final say on that.

More than likely only one of Bo'ness, Newtowngrange and Musselburgh in the quarter finals is good news for the smaller clubs.

The discipline system change is almost certainly pyramid related, so it suggests that pyramid entry is still on their agenda.

Access to the Scottish cup and SFA full member related money would be the obvious ones in the context of a league where there were no clubs with large supports, because the East Superleague and its predecessors were still going strong. You found your niche and had a very good run on the back of it for 30 years or so, but the landscape changed once clubs like EK became the main rival to Spartans at the top of the table in an LL context and more relatively strong clubs like the Shire, Cumbernauld Colts, BSC Glasgow and Kelty started moving in and that's only the beginning of what's coming over the horizon in the next decade or so.