So, as I said this morning, Celtic had to seek urgent clarification on the issue of how clubs deal with Omicron, by close of business today, or risk having to truck our entire squad to the Highlands in a fleet of buses or worse; in a fleet of cars.
The information we’ve gotten back is that – surprise surprise – the initial advice given to the clubs by our governing bodies was incorrect.
Players on buses will not be treated as “household contacts” and made to self-isolate just because of one positive case on a coach.
Players who test positive or who haven’t been vaccinated will still have to abide by the usual rules, but if a player is double vaccination and returns a negative test then he is good to go. I imagine the vaccination status applies to most of our squad.
Nevertheless, although grateful for the clarity I have nagging doubts over how this will all be implemented, nagging doubts because of the apparent incompetence of those who run the game here.
How can they have gotten such a simple instruction so spectacularly wrong?
The suggestion that entire squads could have been ruled out of games for a single positive case is so extreme, so enormous, that you’d have thought they’d have double and triple checked to make sure that it was necessary before telling clubs it was.
And they didn’t.
Not even when Jason Leitch went on the radio and contradicted them.
The Scottish Government’s clinical director, for God’s sake, quite literally The Guy Who Knows.
That’s a whole level above mere incompetence.
That is scandalous.
What if we’d gotten a positive case last week and cancelled our plans for the weekend past, the midweek game and our fans had been told that the League Cup Final was also off?
And then we find out, today, that it’s all good, that a mistake was made?
This is the only association who could have made a mess like this, and surrounded clubs with all this uncertainty on such a massive issue.
I cannot believe that Celtic aren’t furious behind the scenes; Ange certainly seemed utterly perplexed yesterday, but it’s like everything else; a little blood and thunder on a single issue and then it all goes away.
Instead our club should be focussing on the point which is obvious to all of us who watch the game’s governance screw up again and again and again; the SPFL and the SFA are not fit for purpose and both are in need of serious reform.
Their amatuer hour antics are bad enough at the best of times.
But on an issue such as this? Jesus, heads really have to roll at some point.