Celtic Should Be Pushing For A Simple Change: Restore The Former League Cup Schedule.

In his after match press conference last night, Ange Postecoglou lamented the number of games that we have to fit into a short time. I had full sympathy with him, of course, because it’s true.

There are more games than ever before. The schedule is murderous.

But Scottish Football likes making things hard for teams like ours.

One of the stupidest things that our so-called leaders have done in recent years is the way the League Cup has changed. Scheduling quarters, semi-finals and even the final itself amidst European Group Stage football … what in God’s name was the purpose of that?

If you were looking for a way to purposefully weaken either the European endeavours or weaken the Group Stage clubs for the League Cup competition this is what you would devise.

I don’t see how either is to the benefit of the Scottish game.

The changes have wreaked havoc on the schedules. And you know what else? If the purpose was to weaken our club and make it non-competitive in that arena, then it failed miserably.

We have won four out of the last five. We’re in the final for the fifth year in six.

It is an incredibly stupid, narrow minded and short sighted change.

It is now starting to do real damage to clubs, ours in particular.

Everything about it seems poorly thought out. We are the only country who would even contemplate putting domestic cup final rounds in amongst critical European group stage games. It is madness, and things need to change.

Celtic should be lobbying for a restoration of the old competition schedule and I think we’d have ample support from the club across the city. The only reason other clubs wouldn’t be banging the same drum is because their European displays have been sufficiently pitiful that none of them has encountered this problem yet.

But with the Europa Conference League some of them will, soon enough, and you better believe that the whingeing will start almost immediately.

This stopped looking like us being punished for our success seasons ago.

It now actively looks like an attempt to actually hamstrung us and perhaps Ibrox from being able to compete on several different fronts at this time of year.

It is the antithesis of sporting integrity; it is outrageous and scandalous and it is high time we went back to a saner way of doing things.