Scottish League Cup Semi-final disgrace

Fir Park semi disaster shows League Cups failures

By Matthew Harold

The SPL is meant to be Scotland’s premier level of football, yet some of the facilities in the SPL are barely even amateur level. That can be illustrated in one ground, Fir Park were the SFL, the organisers of the League Cup decided in their infinite wisdom to stage the semi-final between Hearts and St Mirren.

The game which got changed to the Lanarkshire venue because of the size of the anticipated crowd should have never been changed to Motherwell. It’s as if the organisers never looked at the history of the Fir Park pitch, which is probably worse than most junior grounds in the local area.

The state of the pitch helped create one of the worst footballing spectacles of the season. The park which kept cutting up even worse than it was before the game, had to be patted down by the coaching staffs of both teams and even the fourth official shows than the decision to stage it there is absolutely baffling.

The crowd of 9,170 could have easily been housed in a stadium such as Firhill or Almondvale. Firhill which even though a rugby team plays there as well as Partick Thistle is still a far superior pitch compared to that which the teams played on at Motherwell.

Another baffling observation about the League Cup semi-final was that the SPL had decided to put two league games on the same evening, one of which was televised by a national broadcaster.

The people that will be most disappointed in this will be the sponsors, Co-operative Insurance. They have stood behind the League cup for the last 11 years, making them the longest-running sponsors of any of the league or cup competitions in Scotland.

These sponsors are what keeps the League Cup alive, yet the competition which they have invested vast amounts of money in has been treated like a sideshow, which media outlets see as something on the same level as the lower divisions in Scotland.

Ultimately what it means is that the SFL, who currently run the League Cup need to make massive changes to the tournament so that the sponsors, who invest the money to keep the cup alive feel they are receiving value for money.

Also so that the spectators, who have to pay large amounts of money to watch what they try to call football. When it’s played on parks such as the ground that the Hearts vs St Mirren game was played on, then maybe the SFL should have moved the game to a public park, as the fans may have got to see an actual game of football.