Scottish Premiership return plan revealed as Neil Donaster holds crucial government summit

The SPFL and SFA are keen to have players back in training in two weeks.

Scottish football will today ask parliament to sanction a return to training for top-flight clubs.

And there is a potential restart date pencilled in for June 15. SFA chief executive Ian Maxwell and his SPFL counterpart Neil Doncaster will hold a conference call with the minister for public health, sport and wellbeing Joe FitzPatrick and national clinical director Jason Leitch
this afternoon.

And they will push for permission to bring Premiership players out of lockdown as soon as possible, perhaps as soon as a fortnight on Monday.

The crunch discussions – which will also include the heads of rugby and horse racing – will take place following yesterday’s relaxation of the current coronavirus restrictions by First Minister Nicola Sturgeon.

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And the heads of football in this county now believe and hope they can begin to get safely back
to business without breaching the new Phase One guidelines.

A Hampden source last night said: “We are not talking about going straight back to full-scale training matches with tackles and contact.

“Even though that’s what the UK government has approved south of the border, that’s not what they are looking for in Scotland yet.

“On the contrary, we are only looking for Holyrood to endorse a phased return to training which will begin with small training sessions involving one coach and a couple of players at a time. That is all for now.

“The players won’t hang around together in training grounds.

“They will arrive in their cars, go straight on to the pitch and then drive home in their kit to get showered.

“We then have proposals as to how we get from that stage to putting on full scale sessions with contact.

“If we can start this from June 15 then we can
realistically begin to work towards beginning the new Premiership season in early August.”