Hearts and Partick Thistle should know the final fate of their battle against relegation in around a fortnight.
That is the view of one of Scotland’s leading lawyers, as fans up and down the country await tomorrow morning’s announcement of the 2020-21 Premiership fixtures.
Friday’s decision by the Court of Session not to try the evidence, but to have it instead heard by an independent tribunal, was just the latest twist in a tale that stretches back to the beginning of the shutdown in mid-March.
However, Paul Reid, of Ampersand Advocates in Edinburgh, argues last week’s decision not to try the evidence at the Court of Session could be a good thing – for the clubs and for Scottish football.
“There are advantages,” he said
“It works to a 28-day period, and should be done a lot quicker in these circumstances.”
Asked if the final ruling could be just a couple of weeks away, Reid replied: “I would imagine it would be that sort of order.
“If it had stayed with the Court, they had time available for the week after next.
“So that would have been two, two-and-a-half weeks, and I would imagine the arbitration panel would want to do something similar.
“Lord Clark said a number of times he is sympathetic to the urgency of it, and he is not at all critical of Hearts and Partick Thistle for coming with this now.
“He said they explored an alternative with reconstruction, and when that didn’t happen, they came to court quite quickly.
“So he wants to make sure there is a decision in time for the season to start.
“It is not August 1 they will be aiming for, either, because clubs will need time to get everything up and running.”
That will especially apply, Reid believes, should Hearts and Partick Thistle’s legal representatives manage to convince the panel that they should not be relegated.
“It would be a big decision to take, but independent panels and tribunals take big decisions all the time,” he said.
“From what we know in the public domain about the Dundee vote – that it was received prior to deadline and that it was critical – you can understand why a court of a tribunal would say there is a case to answer.
“They would want answers to that.
“Which way it goes would really depend what is in those documents into what was going on in the run up to those decisions being taken.
“All the arguments Hearts and Partick Thistle wanted to present to the court can be presented to the panel. So nothing was won and nothing was lost.
“If they have a measure of success in this, there might need to be a rejigging of fixtures pretty close to the wire.
“And, of course, unless something goes badly wrong, there is no appeal. That is not the same with the court, which does give you the mechanism to complain.
“So there will be a final and a binding decision sometime this month.”
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