Here’s why the SPFL don’t give a toss about safety of supporters – every game on Saturday should’ve been called off

LYNSEY McLEAN has a matchday to-do list longer than an orangutan’s throw-in.

And I’m pretty sure it doesn’t include grabbing a shovel and putting in a shift like a navvy.

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Yet come half two, there was St Mirren’s general manager, out with the stewards and turnstile operators and ball boys, putting her back into hoofing piles of snow off the pitch.

Still in her day-job gear of short-sleeved top, skirt and boots, too.
Why?

Because there were thousands of her club’s fans standing outside the stadium, desperate for one of the biggest home games of the season to go ahead.

Because 1,500 Dons diehards had braved the snow to make it a near sell-out.

Because two sets of players had sweated bullets all week for the chance to get out there and do their jobs.

Because once you’re there, once you’ve braved the elements to get through the gates, being told, ‘It’s Aff’, is the worst feeling on earth.

At which point, I’ll make my feelings on Saturday’s fiasco of a fixture list clear — EVERY game should’ve been ‘Aff’ at first light of a frozen Saturday morning.

If the people who run our leagues gave a toss for the safety and comfort of supporters, players, club staff, emergency workers and more, they wouldn’t have asked any of them to travel on a day when the weather was foul and roads were a nightmare.

Then again, if those people gave a toss for all of the above, one of them would surely have popped their head above the parapet to explain why instead they chose to leave us all at the mercy of the elements.

A two-minute radio interview with Neil Doncaster, that would have done it. Tell us why all the risks people took were worth it.

Tell us why they allowed, for instance, Stenhousemuir to set out on a bus run to Cove that ended in a snowdrift just outside Perth.

Tell us why Dundee United and Dunfermline were wrong to ask for more time to prepare after stressful journeys littered with holds-ups and accidents.

Tell us why, for the first time I can ever remember, referees were told to push kick-offs back as far as need be rather than making early calls.

Maybe even just say well done to all those volunteers battling, many of them in vain, to try to get a ball kicked.

You know, show a bit of leadership.

Make the Lynsey McLeans of the world feel like they matter as much to the SPFL as their clubs do to them.

Sadly, though, even this most basic level of empathy seems beyond the pay grade of the SPFL’s invisible men.

So all we’re left to presume is this, that on a day when they had sold two top-flight matches for live evening telly coverage, they were s***-scared to tell Celtic and Hibs it was OK for them to travel to Dundee and Edinburgh.

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But not for Aberdeen to go to Paisley or Dundee United to Glasgow.

That’s my guess, and it might be miles off the mark.

But what else is there to do but speculate when we’re run by a cabal who see absolutely no need to explain anything to anyone, to justify any decisions they ever make?

Or, in this case, which they fail to make.

See, that’s the bit Doncaster and his cronies don’t get, the fact that if you don’t explain yourself, the world will make its own mind up.

That lack of communication was the difference between us shaking our heads and laughing at the catalogue of ever-more bizarre events that mounted up, and us cursing them upside down for allowing it all to happen on Saturday.

Ref Don Robertson ordering Dundee United players to stop warming up and get stripped for action at 3.45, even though they only reached Ibrox at 2.58.

Dunfermline feeling the need to issue an angry statement after being given the same short shrift at Somerset Park.

Then there was perhaps my favourite moment of the whole caper, news that even though Ross County against Motherwell WERE ready to start at three, VAR was down and there would be a 15-minute delay.

Throw in the fog at Dens, kick- off at Montrose v Annan going back two hours to 5pm, and much more besides.

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It’s clear that if ever there was a day for SPFL to be fully on-message and in tune with those at the sharp end, this was surely to hell it.

So the fact that they hid behind the sofa as per? The fact they said and did hee-haw?

Well, it should remind us of two things.

One, they are about as much use as a crispbread snow shovel.

And two, that the ones who REALLY keep football going are the one who shifted the snow and hung around for the turnstiles to open, who drove the buses, and who kept the hot drinks coming.

You can talk commercial deals all you like, call it a money-driven business all you like, shrug that TV rules the roost these days.

But without the volunteers, without the pie stall workers, without the bus drivers and, probably most of all, without the ones who buy the tickets, there’s simply nothing.

We saw that in its most human form at Paisley on Saturday, where there literally would have been nothing had dozens of unpaid grafters not shifted a mountain of snow so ref John Beaton could start what turned out to be a tremendous, end-to-end battle.

That’s what this game of ours is all about. These are the real heroes.

While the ones in the blazers? Just call them Storm Berks.

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