IAN Murray has called for a rethink of Scotland's "stupid and ridiculous" play-off schedule, saying it "caters" to the bigger teams.
The Airdrie boss, whose side narrowly missed out on a place in the Championship, has called for the lower leagues to be made bigger in a bid to protect players' "physical health", insisting the current set-up doesn't reward clubs for doing well.
Having had just three days to prepare for the first-leg of the play-off semi-final and then tasked with two games in four days, Murray believes the long season caught up with the Diamonds, who had finished 21 points clear of Queen's Park in the regulation season.
Murray said: “There’s a lot of focus on the mental health of players, quite rightly, but sometimes there isn’t enough about their physical health.
“We’ve had to try and win every single game since Christmas to keep up with Cove Rangers at the top, we missed out in the second last week, then we had to get them recovered to go again and the only thing I’d say is that the time they ask us to play such high-pressure, hard games is so stupid, so ridiculous.
“We’ve a whole season to play midweek games in, yet we seem to cater to the team above every single time. The second-bottom Premiership team gets pretty much a week off to prepare for their play-off, but the rest of us don’t get that and for the life of me I don’t know why."
The 41-year-old added: “I don’t know how you avoid a situation like that when the leagues are so small. The one solution would be to make the leagues bigger, because we’ve seen this season how little there is between the bottom end of the Championship and the top of League One.
“It’s time they had a look at that, at promoting and demoting more teams. I mean, you do so well and don’t get rewarded for it."
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here