Professor Jason Leitch insists Premiership will kick off on time

Scotland’s clinical director says positive Covid test at St Mirren ‘not much of a setback’

Asked if he thought the Premiership season would kick off on time this Saturday, Professor Jason Leitch said: 'Yes'

Scotland’s national clinical director has allayed fears that next weekend’s start of the 2020-21 Premiership season will be delayed, insisting that the positive test for coronavirus at St Mirren is “not much of a setback”.

News emerged last week that the Paisley club had gone into lockdown after seven members of their coaching staff had produced positive tests for Covid-19, although the seven cases were reduced to just one after retesting.

Concerns were raised that the scare could prevent the top flight kicking off as scheduled on 1 August. Four fixtures are due to be played this coming Saturday – including St Mirren’s visit of Livingston – while there is also a game on Sunday and one on Monday as competitive football in this country finally gets back under way following the pandemic.

St Mirren chairman Gordon Scott leaves The Simple Digital Arena, where seven of the club's coaching staff initially tested positive for coronavirus. Picture: SNS

In response to the St Mirren test, the Scottish Professional Football League announced that all 12 Premiership clubs would return to testing twice per week rather than once.

Speaking to Radio Scotland’s Off The Ball programme yesterday, though, Professor Jason Leitch said that he did not anticipate any threat to the opening fixtures.

“A couple of friendly games had to be called off, but hopefully, all being well, the league can start on 1 August,” said Leitch.

Asked specifically if he thought the Premiership would start as planned on Saturday, he added: “Yes. They are doing well.

“There was a little bit of a hiccup, but they are catching the positives and they were very quick to act.

“There is clearly some work to do behind the scenes, but, in the main, the system has worked pretty well and they have gone back to testing twice a week to try to keep these bubbles secure.”

Leitch, inset, pointed out, too, that clubs should have “very strict separation in place” between backroom staff and players – in which case the St Mirren episode should not have resulted in a serious threat to the first team.

“I would be very surprised if any of the players are anywhere near that individual within two metres,” he explained.

Leitch revealed that a working group is looking at ways of making the clubs’ private testing more integrated with the “test and protect” system used by the NHS. It was the private testing method which produced the six false positive results at 
St Mirren.

“Just now, that testing is not as reliable as our NHS testing, so we then retest them and put them in the ‘Test and Protect’ system,” said Leitch.

“It may be that if we can get those labs examined and accredited, we can put all of that into one big bundle, but that is going to take a wee while because there’s quite a lot of private laboratories offering Covid testing.”

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