Highland Pyramid

[patriot1]

1 hour ago, FairWeatherFan said:

Considering this morning started with a back and forth between Burnie & Jimi over if Broughty have applied, it's kind of news. Since it suggests whatever the intentions no application has been put in yet.

The question is historic rather than current as it asks if any Dundee team had applied and been denied. 

As the deadline isn’t for another seven weeks I wouldn’t expect any applications to have gone in yet and don’t remember in each of the last three years the EOS haven’t commented on applications until after the deadline.

 

[patriot1]

1 hour ago, Burnieman said:

1 hour ago, Whitburn Vale said:

A big part of the West Lothian clubs courting the WoS is because of this Tayside clubs in the EoS talk........
Yeah they dont fancy Coldstream,Hawick or Tweedmouth but that's about it,as far as the EoS is concerned,they may have once played Tayside clubs in the east juniors but they want nothing to do with them now.....

It's long overdue that league boundaries are defined to remove any sort of ambiguity. The EoS board should have had a position on this without needing to go to members at AGM for each individual application. Same with WoS.

You are spot on Burnie. Some Tayside teams have been under the misapprehension that they couldn’t apply to the EOS which has probably led to them being in limbo.

Both the Tayside and West Lothian situations should be resolved by the leagues. Clubs should be asked their opinions on boundaries rather than voting on individual applications.

[stanley]

3 hours ago, patriot1 said:

The question is historic rather than current as it asks if any Dundee team had applied and been denied. 

As the deadline isn’t for another seven weeks I wouldn’t expect any applications to have gone in yet and don’t remember in each of the last three years the EOS haven’t commented on applications until after the deadline.

 

The second reply states that no clubs have applied. They aren't saying no club has applied and been denied; they are saying no club has applied at all.

It would be very strange for them to explicitly state that if a Dundee team has already applied this season.

Edited February 9, 2021 by stanley

[patriot1]

1 hour ago, stanley said:

The second reply states that no clubs have applied. They aren't saying no club has applied and been denied; they are saying no club has applied at all.

It would be very strange for them to explicitly state that if a Dundee team has already applied this season.

As I said I doubt any applications have gone in this far in advance of the deadline.

But who knows, maybe the Tayside teams are happy where they are. We’ll know more in April.

[GordonS]

On 06/02/2021 at 21:13, Jimmy Shaker said:

No one except the crayon-wielding pyramid planners on here believes the Tayside lot should be bolted into the Highland pyramid set-up. They are never mentioned in conversation about the subject in real life, and very rarely on FitbaNorth.com.

It was foretold when the pyramid was set up with two divisions that this could get Lionel with regards to the clubs in the middle of the country so it's no surprise at this point to see them in limbo. Not entirely sure why the Tayside clubs would want a place in the Highland pyramid, other than the belief they'd get out of it quicker.

You don't need to be a crayon-wielding pyramid planner to think that having two Tier 5 leagues where one of them covers 4.3 million people and the other covers 900,000 people is a bit unbalanced. If you're having a north league and a south league then the Tay is a perfectly sensible place to draw the line.

[Juanhourjoe]

17 hours ago, GordonS said:

You don't need to be a crayon-wielding pyramid planner to think that having two Tier 5 leagues where one of them covers 4.3 million people and the other covers 900,000 people is a bit unbalanced. If you're having a north league and a south league then the Tay is a perfectly sensible place to draw the line.

From a Southern perspective maybe. But at that level. Geographical distance I would suspect is far more important to clubs, and the fans than population. For a north/south split to be the have worked properly. It needed to start higher up the leagues.

[FairWeatherFan]

40 minutes ago, Juanhourjoe said:

From a Southern perspective maybe. But at that level. Geographical distance I would suspect is far more important to clubs, and the fans than population. For a north/south split to be the have worked properly. It needed to start higher up the leagues.

It didn't need to start higher up the leagues. Simply being an open application process like the Lowland League would have been enough. Problem is that would have gutted the existing Highland League, and they weren't going to leave members behind.

There are teams playing at Tier 5 that shouldn't really be there. That's in both Highland and Lowland leagues. The difference is the Lowland has had a pyramid beneath it that's brought some changes over the years.

 

[GordonS]

57 minutes ago, Juanhourjoe said:

From a Southern perspective maybe. But at that level. Geographical distance I would suspect is far more important to clubs, and the fans than population. For a north/south split to be the have worked properly. It needed to start higher up the leagues.

Even geographically - draw a line across Scotland from Stonehaven and it's clear that far more than half of the country is in the southern part.

In any case, the majority of senior and junior clubs north of Stonehaven are in Aberdeenshire. Angus and Dundee are considerably closer to them than they are to West Central Scotland. Brechin to Keith is 1 hour 38, but Brechin to Glasgow is 1 hour 58. There are outliers like Wick and Brora, but there are outliers like Berwick and Dalbeattie the other way too.

There are discussions to be had about tier 6, but by any measure at Tier 5 Angus and Dundee should be in the north.

What this is really about is that the HL clubs and fans are used to their patch and don't want to see it expand. Fair enough, I can understand that. But that was always the obvious consequence of the HL/LL line, and the HL signed up to it. And altering it now would give northern clubs typically shorter journeys than southern clubs, as well as covering a far smaller population.

 

[sdr71]

I'd be interested to see a map which places half the population of Scotland in the Highland League catchment.  How far south would it get?

[invergowrie arab]

2 hours ago, sdr71 said:

I'd be interested to see a map which places half the population of Scotland in the Highland League catchment.  How far south would it get?

If you take NHS boards then Orkney,Shetland, Western Isles, Highland, Grampian, Tayside, Fife, Forth Valley, Lothian and Borders would be 50% of the population.

Greater Glasgow, Lanarkshire,Ayrshire and D&G would be other 50%

[Juanhourjoe]

If population was the more important part of the setup. Then wouldn't east/west split make more sense? I would have thought the whole point of a regional leave at this level. Was to have teams fairly close together, and work back from there.

[invergowrie arab]

Ive never understood why those who want to play at a national level can't do so.

Just keep filling  national leagues until you get to teams who don't fancy it and regionalise from there.

[AsimButtHitsASix]

16 hours ago, Juanhourjoe said:

If population was the more important part of the setup. Then wouldn't east/west split make more sense? I would have thought the whole point of a regional leave at this level. Was to have teams fairly close together, and work back from there.

North/East/West is the obvious way to do it in Scotland. SPL/SPFL didn't want that and wanted one national conference below them. The HL/LL split was the compromise

[Juanhourjoe]

2 hours ago, AsimButtHitsASix said:

North/East/West is the obvious way to do it in Scotland. SPL/SPFL didn't want that and wanted one national conference below them. The HL/LL split was the compromise

Completely agree, that's what it should be. And probably will one day. After many arguments and splits.

[Juanhourjoe]

17 hours ago, invergowrie arab said:

Ive never understood why those who want to play at a national level can't do so.

Just keep filling  national leagues until you get to teams who don't fancy it and regionalise from there.

Nah, get Dundee in the Tayside superleague.

[Gordon EF]

18 hours ago, Juanhourjoe said:

If population was the more important part of the setup. Then wouldn't east/west split make more sense? I would have thought the whole point of a regional leave at this level. Was to have teams fairly close together, and work back from there.

The way Scotland's geography works, a nice 50:50 split that works in terms of area, distances and population would never be possible. The fact that the Highland League would always be more geographically dispersed and cover a smaller population has always and will always be a given. The issue is really about whether the population balances are at lest kept semi-sensible at the expense of some clubs travelling further distances or whether the population split becomes an utter piss-take.

I'd say that if the Lowland League is covering an area with more than four times the population of the Highland League, the notion of automatic promotion is extremely hard to argue for down the line. That should be a consideration in these things. 

[FairWeatherFan]

2 hours ago, AsimButtHitsASix said:

North/East/West is the obvious way to do it in Scotland. SPL/SPFL didn't want that and wanted one national conference below them. The HL/LL split was the compromise

The SFA had been suggesting North/South for a good 5+ years before the introduction of the Lowland League. Mainly because they knew it came down to facilities. The North was covered while there was a dearth in the South. 

They could scrape together 20 clubs and get the SFL to sign off on it.  Since the SFL were skint and had clubs in financial trouble. That's also why the SFA would cover the parachute payments for Club 42 to get them on board. As 40k was a lot of money to the SFL at the time. 

The main problem the pyramid has had has been the lack of vision beyond simply getting feeders to the national leagues. 

[GordonS]

On 10/02/2021 at 19:14, sdr71 said:

I'd be interested to see a map which places half the population of Scotland in the Highland League catchment.  How far south would it get?

Edinburgh.

I would hate to see us go down the English route, I think it's more important to have regions with reasonably equivalent travel than population. But drawing the line north of Montrose, as many want, would be very imbalanced in favour of the north.

[GordonS]

On 11/02/2021 at 14:23, AsimButtHitsASix said:

North/East/West is the obvious way to do it in Scotland. SPL/SPFL didn't want that and wanted one national conference below them. The HL/LL split was the compromise

I don't think that's obvious at all tbh. It's obviously more rational from a crayon-wielding point of view, but it dilutes quality in each of the leagues and means there's a bigger drop in quality from national to regional. It would work just now because there are only 2-3 west clubs at T5, but that will undoubtedly change as the WoS clubs move up.

[Jimmy Shaker]

On 11/02/2021 at 17:07, FairWeatherFan said:

The main problem the pyramid has had has been the lack of vision beyond simply getting feeders to the national leagues. 

Indeed. 

I dare say it'll take a few years of rejigging the entire set-up to find something that works. The Highland League really should have been more involved in developing a northern structure by now - in days of yore before Tayside clubs were mentioned, it really wouldn't have been difficult to shape one - but the lack of interest from certain clubs back in the early days of this has set us back a fair bit. Now Cove are gone, I don't think there's much interest in it at all, sadly.