Rangers coach Michael Beale offers radical solution to Coronavirus chaos
Rangers coach Michael Beale has suggested that the Scottish Premiership should be decided by the points standing at the halfway point of the season.
All matches are currently postponed due to the ongoing Coronavirus pandemic, with mounting uncertainty over how the rest of the campaign.
But Beale believes that should the season be abandoned, the fairest solution would be to tally things up from the point at which every team had played each other once.
At that stage of the season, Rangers were just two points behind Celtic in the title race, with a game in hand against St. Johnstone still to come.
As quoted by the Scottish Sun, Beale said: “Unless the leagues can be split in a fair way, a league with less teams like Scotland can decide to not predict into the future – but go back to a point where each team has played each other twice and use that as a fair reference of the teams level over the equal part of the season.
“If the positions are the same as at that point I think it’s a fairer reference point as each team has played each other twice.
“But we must never determine relegation based on a points total where each team has played a different mix of games or opponents and nothing is mathematically decided.
“This would kill all sporting integrity.”
Would this be a fair solution to the problem?
At this present moment in time, it’s safe to say that the most preferable solution would be to play the remaining matches at a later date.
Nobody wants to see the season derailed in the manner that it has been, regardless of league standings, and the sooner we can get back to some kind of normality, the better for everybody.
That being said, if the worst comes to the worst and an alternative has to be found, you can at least understand Beale’s logic here.
Would it massively upset a lot of people, not least Celtic fans who would see their 13 point lead slashed at the top of the table? Yes, of course.
But would it also be a relatively sensible way of using the information we have already collected to solve a very, very awkward dilemma? Potentially, yes.
At the end of the day, no matter what the relevant governing bodies decide, somebody, somewhere is going to feel shortchanged.
In other Rangers news, Ibrox View: Kris Commons makes unusually astute point in Gers title race claim.