St Mirren Must Make Every Effort To Play Celtic’s Game In Midweek.

I feel bad for any club which has a major virus outbreak.

But you know what?

As long as they can put a team on the park, any team, there should be no question of a postponement.

As Dundee Utd are playing tomorrow without a full team, St Mirren must do the same in midweek.

We would be made to play the fixture if it was us.

For openers, it is our game in hand from this weekend, and I don’t want to see it cancelled and rescheduled God knows when. I want us to play every game right now, even with our injury issues. We cannot afford to let the narrative take root that we are a significant number of points behind, even with games in hand. It creates its own pressures.

But most importantly, nobody would care if this was us.

When we had virtually a whole team out last season we were told that it was our own hard lines and the games went ahead.

I agreed with it, by the way, but it set the stage for the current crisis.

Things would be different if we were going with the government’s “household rules”; one positive case rules out everyone who was a “close contact.” In those circumstances, of course games should be called off.

But we’re not in that scenario.

We’re going with vaccination and negative testing, so there shouldn’t be any way that entire squads are ruled out unless clubs have been very, very careless in their testing protocols.

We don’t know what the situation at St Mirren is, or whether this is the Delta variant or Omicron.

We don’t know how many players are out.

But if they can soldier on they should.

Because if they don’t then we’re making it up as we go along and Celtic would simply not be permitted to do that.

We know that because we weren’t.

As the rules stand right now, the show must go on unless clubs are utterly gutted and cannot put out a team, and in that case the regulations once dictated that the game was forfeit.

Unless there has been a change in those rules, that’s where we are.

I feel bad for St Mirren, and for Dundee Utd, and for every other club which is likely to suffer during this spell, and that includes us when the time comes. As it will.

But I know that when it does come we’ll be told to play no matter how many players are out.

And we can’t be punished by different rules just because we have a bigger squad.

That’s not how its supposed to work, even if some in the media think it should.