Peterhead manager Jim McInally believes all of Scottish football should be paused and not just the lower leagues.
The SFA and Scottish Government have made the decision to suspend all football outwith the Premiership and Championship for the rest of this month.
However, Blue Toon boss McInally believes the top two leagues should be put on hold as well.
Premiership clubs have been Covid-19 testing throughout the 2020-21 season and although Championship clubs were able to begin the campaign with only temperature testing they too will now need to conduct coronavirus tests.
McInally believes the testing and apparently bio-secure bubbles that those in the upper echelons of the Scottish game have been operating in have not proven to be any safer than the measures in place in the lower leagues.
Suspension of football outwith Premiership and Championship – https://t.co/sjkPpDwAAe
— Peterhead FC (@pfcofficial) January 11, 2021
Scotland’s longest serving manager, whose side had been due to play Stenhousemuir tomorrow night in the Scottish Cup, said: “These are crazy times and as far as football goes I come back to testing and I think we can say that testing has been a waste of time and bubbles don’t work.
“I don’t think the part-time game has been any more damaged than the full-time game by Covid disruption.
“At part-time level there was one situation with Clyde – but at full-time level there have been multiple incidents.
“When it comes to bubbles that are supposed to exist in the full-time game they will never exist unless the teams are locked away in hotels away from their families.
“To be honest I think they whole game should be stopped – I don’t think it should just be below Championship level.
“In the Championship you have Alloa and Arbroath who will have their players tested twice a week and then some of them will have to go to their work outside football so there’s no sense in it.
“And with the Premiership and full-time Championship teams unless they’re going into a bubble away from their families there’s no point.
“I don’t know if they’ve been told they needed to stop, but there has been a lack of leadership from the SFA right from the start of the pandemic.
“There’s plenty of justification to stop football when everything else has been stopped – but there’s no justification in leaving the full-time teams to play.”
With Covid-19 infections across Scotland increasing over the last month McInally was in favour of a suspension of football earlier this month.
He added: “I felt it wouldn’t have been a bad idea to stop a couple of weeks ago, but everything seems to be happening two weeks too late in my opinion.
“I felt maybe pausing at the beginning of January might have been the way to go and it’s hard to make sense of the decision after all this time.
“Everything that’s happened over the last year I think we’ve all spoken about what might happen a month or a few weeks ahead and been told it won’t happen and then it does happen.
“There’s been talk of circuit-breakers and the reason I favoured a pause starting earlier was because I think we could see what was coming.
“Before Christmas they announced the easing of restrictions at Christmas and there was a bad reaction and I think we knew there would be a lockdown just after Christmas as a result.
“So having seen that I just felt football in general should have been shutdown.”
