The SPL season is over for another year. Good.
This has quite possibly been the worst season league season since the SPL began. There are a few factors that weight against it when coming to this opinion. For one, the spectacular end to the season that our neighbours down south experienced that has now been officially decided as being the greatest thing that has ever happened has overshadowed anything else that has been going on. We will be constantly reminded about how sectarianism plagues our game, but a couple of goals in the dying seconds of a title decider means that how badly racism affects the English game will be allowed to be forgotten about for a decent period of time.
When people reminisce about league seasons gone by, the summary of how good a season has been is heavily influenced by how the season finished. If there is still something meaningful to play for after all those months, you allow yourself to get swept up in the thought that your season has been leading to something, and what you have invested for all that time might be worth something. But while there is still that lack of uncertainty about whether it will all be worth it, it keeps you going.
This season was something of a flat finish. Going into the last weekend there were two things yet to be decided: the tussle of fifth versus sixth, which may or may not mean anything depending on who wins the cup; and the battle to see who finished eighth or ninth, the fight for the seeded spot in the league cup draw. Hold me back.
I do not blame the split for this, but it certainly does not help. I am not necessarily against the split, to see Scottish football try something a bit different is refreshing, and the idea of having the teams at their respective ends of the table play against those around them should work. It should mean competitive games of similarly matched teams. It should work, but this year, for some reason or another, it just did not.
One of the main issues with it is the drudgery that surrounds the bottom six. At least with the top half, there are European places available, so four of the six places carry a real incentive with them. With the bottom six though, all there is to play for is to not finish bottom. For the other five out of the bottom six, it is not great odds between whether you finish seventh or you finish eleventh. At least if there were a play-off spot for the second bottom team, it would provide more of an incentive for a number of the teams to keep on playing. Hibs, Inverness, Aberdeen and St Mirren would not be seeing out the season from early March if the possibility of a relegation play-off were looming.
But now, we have a situation where mediocre is good enough to stay up, as there will be a truly awful team to ensure your safety. Hibs won two home games all season, and that was not the worst record in the league. Aberdeen scored just fourteen away goals all season, and ended up pretty comfortably clear of relegation. It is for reasons such as this that I do not buy into the idea that increasing the number of teams in the top flight will necessary make for an improvement, it may just increase the mediocrity.
If there is to be a play-off for European places, then this is something that could be done as a totally separate side issue, rather than some of the bottom half teams being forced to play each other at the same as the life and will are strangled to prolong the suffering when they wish the life support machine was switched off a long time ago.
As it is, the top six does not carry enough spice alongside it, or any more than a normal top half finish would, and the bottom six becomes a bit of a joke figure as players start planning their holidays in their heads.
The top half this year was obviously heavily affected by what went on with Rangers. That is not to say that the title was tainted, it just ended up being won too easily. For the teams battling for Europe, the idea of greater hype about them playing on another failed to materialise, and they all seemed to settle for what they were getting. Playing just the teams round about you towards the end means we do not get any pressure added by examining who has the easier run-in and we do not have the prospect of a team aiming for prizes at the top half of the league going to a team who is fighting for its life. We are missing it on some of the traditional end of the season ingredients that other leagues get.
If we are to be confined to a league structure that must provide four Old Firm games a season, then I am starting to shudder at the thought that I may agree with Stewart Milne, and a ten team league may be what we have to go for.
Each team gets two home games against the Old Firm, which is apparently the only way clubs in our league can possibly survive. It gives teams an equal number of home and away games, and each team plays all the other teams in the league a set number of times, rather than getting the opportunity to escape any matches against a potential bogey side. Also, we would avoid any potential difficulties should, hypothetically speaking, an administration stricken Rangers side finish in a different half from Celtic.
That is not to say though that we have to be confined to a model with four guaranteed Old Firm games. As we anxiously wait to see what is actually going to happen to the Ibrox club, there is an air of potential change hovering over Scottish football. Some chairmen have been particularly vocal in their discontent and it does seem like we may be making moves towards a goal, of sorts.
Two of the main plus points from this season have been seeing Kilmarnock surprise Celtic in the League Cup Final and the two Edinburgh teams providing a refreshing Scottish Cup final with some real hype about it, where it means so much to both sides. We have a league that is not just two Old Firm teams, that may become literal, but moments such as these will hopefully provide this timely reminder to certain sections of our game.
The league may have stuttered to a damp finish. But there may just be a couple of breaks in the cloud. What happens this summer will have a huge bearing on how our game develops. A pretty poor season is over. But we move into next season with Kilmarnock and Hearts defending their cup titles, the Champions League music can be played out over Fir Park, a promising Dundee Utd side will venture into Europe and the SPL broadens geographically as we will see our first Highland derby.
This season is over; good, we can now be hopeful for next. Hope though, is a dangerous thing.
simpson_1903
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