Aidan Smith: League Cup shake-up must be with care

FOOTBALL fans subsist on a diet of pies and nostalgia and the game’s rulers are exploiting this to the full right now. Not the pie element – they’d probably rather we ate more healthily – but the obsession with the way things used to be. Hardly a week goes by without the launch of some new initiative, which is really an old initiative, from the era we think of as the golden age.

SPFL chief executive Neil Doncaster is open to the idea of revamping the League Cup. Picture: SNS

First, in a bid to generate more atmosphere in our all-seated breeze-block cathedrals, someone suggested a partial return to standing and Celtic want to introduce such an area from the season after this. Then someone else – possibly David Cameron, who always has the concerns of the Scottish punter uppermost and supports Aston Villa or maybe West Ham United – called for an end to the alcohol ban at matches. This has proved a trickier proposition. Some contend that it would produce rather more atmosphere than the police and security would be able to handle. They question whether the Scottish fan has matured sufficiently from his 1970s incarnation, scarf tied round his wrist, roaming the terraces looking for bovver.

Now, this week already, Archie Macpherson – who once described a mass punch-up at an Old Firm Scottish Cup final as being “like Passchendaele” – has returned to the mic for Sportscene and the idea has been floated for the League Cup to revert to its original format. Yes, the sections are on the brink of a comeback.

In the current terminology, they would be called group stages, but anyone whose first match was one of these ties will always know them as sections. For your correspondent it was 18 August 1967 – Hibernian 3, Clyde 1. Hibs’ scorers were Peter Cormack, Colin Grant and Joe Davis with a penalty, Sam Hastings replying for the Bully Wee.

Falkirks Wilson Hoggan is tackled by Jim Hermiston of Aberdeen in the sectional round of the 1971 League Cup. Picture: SNS

I’ve a huge soft spot for the League Cup and for how the competition used to open each season. Each section consisted of four teams which played each other home and away, midweek and Saturdays. Bringing them back is a nice idea, but we need to be careful with a tournament which has had to endure a lot of tinkering down the years, and a fair bit of neglect as well.

Lacking a sponsor and love, the League Cup has been bumped around the schedules. It’s been drastically slimmed down from the days when a club had to negotiate 12 ties – six section games, a two-legged second round, a home-and-away quarter-final, plus the semi-final and final – to lift the trophy. Now it has teams able to excuse themselves from the first two rounds while they try not to get knocked out of 
Europe, the football equivalent of being allowed to submit homework late.

All of this has devalued the tournament. Now it’s proposed that the League Cup becomes the guinea-pig event for summer football, which obviously carries a risk. Then there’s the not inconsiderable matter of the not inconsiderable number of games the sections would add to the already crammed fixture list.

Even with Euro exclusions, the groups are going to produce more matches than the League Cup does at present. Sections were fine in the days of an 18-team top flight because no one was complaining about too much football. As soon as the Premier League came along, the sections only lasted two more years. At present, the dread scenario is having to play the same team seven times in a season. Hibs and Rangers got to seven last season without meeting in the Scottish Cup. Imagine if they had, and that tie had required a replay. Imagine, too, that the League Cup groups were already in place, and that they’d also been drawn together in that tournament. After an interminable 11 games some fans might very well have asked to be sectioned as well.

The League Cup doesn’t need, or deserve, to be blamed for the failure of summer football, should it not take off, or for overloading the fixture list. The return of the sections could definitely work, but we would need a return to a larger league. That’s the holy grail for those who hark back to the past and it hasn’t happened yet. But, hey, it’s only Wednesday.