Let's Go Round Again
Also, Royal underwear.
Saturday July 17 1976
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Scottish football is too predictable, with the same team winning everything. What we need is to radically shake up the league structure to make it more competitive. Also, a 26-game season is too short and the Spring Cup is a disaster.
It must be time for another general meeting of the Scottish League…
Yes, Hal Stewart is back! Just over a month after the Morton chairman’s plan to move from the current 10-14-14 setup to a 12-12-14 one was withdrawn for lack of support at the last League meeting, he’s back with a new idea.
What if, at the end of this coming season, we relegated two teams from the Premier Division and promoted four from Division 1? That would mean season 1977-78 would have 12 teams in the Premier Division, 12 in the First Division, and, er, 14 in the Second Division. Which sounds familiar.
This differs from his original proposal in two key points - there would still be relegation from the top tier, instead of just adding the top two from the second tier as originally suggested, and this time, the clubs would have a whole year to prepare for it.
Exactly how this has come about is not clear - the last time we went through this process, everyone agreed that it was unworkable, but Bill McFarlane in the Sunday Post this week thinks it’s pretty much guaranteed to happen:
The short article does not explain how a 12-team season would work - 33 or 44 games? What about the League Cup? - but it does suggest that the brave new world of a 10-team top flight is not long for this world. Tune in next week to find out what happens.
What we do know is that the 39-game schedule for Divisions One and Two will be going ahead this season, with some complicated algebra involved in making sure those fixtures were as balanced as possible. I have no doubt that everyone will be happy with the outcome, and no-one will be complaining at the end of the season about having to play their title or relegation rivals twice away from home…
In other news, all the big clubs are now back in pre-season training, although still not allowed to play games in public for another two weeks. Rangers have decided to circumvent this by going on tour (again) to Germany, where allowing spectators to watch games in July isn’t illegal. This comes a matter of weeks after the end of their North American tour, but the players are reputed to be looking forward to it, as it will give them a break from Jock Wallace’s notoriously brutal training routines.
All clubs may be in pre-season training, but not all players are. Some, of course, are recovering from injury, but Dundee United centre back Jackie Copland has been banned by his club from training with his team-mates. His heinous crime? He doesn’t live in Dundee.
This issue has come up surprisingly often in the year or so I’ve been doing this. Of course, the Scottish road network combined with the paper-thin construction methods of 1970s cars may have had something to do with clubs or managers being nervous about their players racking up the miles, and going to training by rail is all very well if you live near a transport hub, but probably not realistic if you need to get to Tannadice for nine in the morning.
Copland tried living in Dundee, but couldn’t settle, and went back home to Paisley some time ago:
United’s prickly manager Jim McLean seems to be quite relaxed about the whole thing, despite it being his rule which is depriving him of one of his key players. He suggested that the best thing for all concerned would be for a team in the West of Scotland to make an offer, which sounds surprisingly magnanimous.
In other football news this week, there was no other football news:
George Connelly was a genuine star player for Celtic, but had multiple personal demons which prevented him from ever reaching his full potential. The press generally treated his regular walkouts as something not to be speculated about, although one of the stories this week did note that he was now teetotal, which was the usual way for newspapers to insinuate something which may or may not have been true.
In other sports, all is going smoothly in the run-up to the Montreal Olympics. No, hang on - everything was going smoothly at the beginning of the week, but it’s all gone a bit wobbly now.
First up, the Taiwan situation. This one falls squarely at the feet of the Canadian government, which did not recognise Taiwan as a separate entity from mainland China. It therefore denied entry to anyone holding a Taiwanese passport, which initially led the IOC to threaten cancellation of the games entirely.
This threat was rolled back, and the individual athletes were offered the opportunity to compete under the Olympic flag, which they declined. The net result is that Taiwan are effectively banned from the Games.
Then there is an issue with what the Daily Record called “Black Africa”. No, really:
This appears to have been a case of brinkmanship, as the issue had been known about months ago. Threats of withdrawal gradually turned to action, which meant that by the weekend, the Sunday Post was running this as their main headline:
The attached article quickly moved on from the distasteful politics1 to note that the Queen, who would be opening the Games and was also in town to support her daughter, was wearing “a pink coat and matching hat”. So, that’s alright, then.
The daughter in question, Princess Anne (still not pregnant, despite the valiant efforts of the Record) spent the week being irritated at the press photographers following her on her journey to Montreal and being amazed that she was able to fly in economy with the rest of the team.
How bad did it get? Well, the Daily Record devoted around a quarter of Monday’s front page to a discussion about her breasts. Again: no, really:
With any luck, the Games will actually go ahead on Monday, and we’ll all have some actual sport to think about.
The front pages, when not preoccupied with royal underwear, had a couple of rolling stories to worry about - the continuing warm weather, which is still causing forest and heathland fires, and the government’s defeat in the Commons on a bill to tax the pensions of war widows, which had every newspaper in the land taking credit for highlighting the issue and encouraging enough Labour MPs to vote against their own party’s proposal.
The Prime Minister will have been only slightly mollified, one suspects, by the result in the Thurrock by-election on Thursday, which doubled his majority in the Commons to two.
Time, I feel, to check in on the UK economy, which appears to be recovering from the crisis of last winter:
Inflation is now “only” 13.8%, which is a significant improvement, although it does mean that prices are still going up:
That is a 33.3% increase, although it is a ‘warning’, not actual news. Still, as long as we can afford bread, the Olympics will serve well as circuses next week, and all will briefly be well with the world. Won’t it?
I don’t think it’s unfair to suggest that a proportion of the Sunday Post readership would have been supportive of South Africa being allowed to play sport, and would not have been trilled to read about all this in their newspaper of choice.