There have been indicative votes, proper votes, a vote that wasn’t a vote, leagues of all shapes and sizes, temporary change and then something more permanent.
Have I missed anything?
Oh yes, colt teams and partnerships have also been thrown into the mix.
The word reconstruction really has been a blanket for a multitude of sins.
Hearts have called in the lawyers and this could run and run.
It is of course their entitlement – and plenty on that side of the argument would say their duty – to do just that.
Who am I to predict whether they will be more successful in a courtroom than they were on a football pitch but one thing we should all be able to agree upon is that this idea of the ‘football family’, certainly in Scotland, is an absolute myth.
Barring John Nelms’ well-intentioned naivety of believing in a common purpose (how will he reflect on that now?) there has never been a serious suggestion through all of this that the SPFL members would find a way to put their own club’s interests anything other than front and centre.
And you can certainly include Ann Budge and Hearts in that.
All those who claimed that they had found the moral high ground didn’t really have anything substantial to lose or gain out of the game of change or no change.
That everybody is looking out for themselves isn’t a criticism but a plague on the house of any chairman or chief executive who in future sets out an agenda with the words ‘for the good of the game’.
A final thought – all of this really does make you wonder how reconstruction has ever been agreed in the past.
It is ironic that a football country that has for decades been so addicted to changing the number of professional leagues it has, how big they are and who comes in and out at the bottom couldn’t even come close to settling upon a solution when the stakes were at their highest.
