Scottish Government official, Professor Jason Leitch has shutdown Celtic manager Neil Lennon’s calls during the week, for the return of fans into Celtic Park.
When speaking in his pre-match press conference for yesterday’s game on Friday, Lennon used the Kansas City Chiefs, in their NFL opener as an example to why Parkhead should be allowed at least a third of the stadium open.
Leitch has today shutdown that example down though, when he was speaking to BBC Scotland, as reported by the Sun.
“I saw that and I looked up Kansas City’s coronavirus numbers as that’s where that game was. Their death rate is the same as our case rate. So their mortality is the same as our number of people who have the virus. So I don’t think we should be taking our example from Kansas City.
“There was an idea that we might open stadia generally this Thursday but we have now decided not to do that because unfortunately we have had 1,150 cases in the last seven days.
“We have had to go in reverse gear a little bit. We are still hopeful there will be further test events but they will now be authorised on a case-by-case basis based on what we need to learn and the safety of that individual test event.”
Yesterday we saw the first two test events of supporters being back inside grounds and they appear to have been a success so far.
There is some logic in Neil Lennon’s thinking. If we can have test events in smaller stadiums such as Ross County’s. Then surely the 60,000 seater in the East End of Glasgow can be used easily, with social distancing measures.
It was expected that in the next few weeks, we would see more test events. But because of the rising cases, in particular in Glasgow this thought may be pushed back in the thoughts of the Scottish Government. It was also announced during the week, that the gradual introduction of fans again, had been pushed back from the 14th of September to the 5th of October.
We can only hope this isn’t the case though and more test events are allowed to take place as long as social distancing guidelines are followed, with supporters desperate to get back inside to watch their team after so many months of absence.
