WE need to resolve the unfinished business of this football season and then work out how the next season is structured. Perhaps it’s time for some innovation in respect of the tired four-tier leagues numbering 12 then 3 x 10 teams apiece.

It may be fair enough in the end to reward the current league leaders with 2019/20 titles, but relegation would be totally unfair. So, for one season only (or maybe not, if we like it) let’s go forward to the past and restore big leagues, which will give us some surprises through unfamiliarity plus end-of-season excitement with top teams facing up to the desperate relegation contenders. Not having leagues split with a handful of games left would in my opinion be truly marvellous.

Three leagues sounds about right to me. If they comprised 18 teams each, we would need to introduce 12 top junior teams into the professional ranks. Top amateur sides would then enter the junior ranks. But maybe we won’t have time for 34 league games, so a 16-team league set up would result in a 30-game league season and six sides stepping up from the junior ranks.

I seem to remember that Rangers fans enjoyed most of their journey up through the lower leagues and it was very refreshing to have only occasional Celtic v Rangers over-hyped games littering the season. And doesn’t Arbroath v Aberdeen sounds an intriguing local derby to open the campaign next season?

The Scottish football product is obviously flawed and the money men have taken over from the fans and the players – the genuine footballing people. If we improve the product in terms of excitement and interest, our standards might improve too. Creativity please: back to the future.

David Crines, Hamilton.

THE precarious security of National Hunt Jockeys following indefinite suspension of the sport ("Mania at a loss over uncertain future", Nick Robson, Herald Sport, March 21) highlights the coronavirus effect on many jockeys who are freelance.

Ryan Mania's career bears an uncanny similarity to the fame, and fortunes of fellow jockey Liam Treadwell. Both rode Grand National winners, Treadwell in 2009 on Mon Mone (100/1) Mania on Auroras Encore (66/1) in 2013. Both retired due to lack of rides on offer. Last year both came out of retirement.

Hopefully these proven winners will still be to the fore when the sport resumes.

Allan C Steele, Giffnock

If only…

WITH time on my hands due to current restrictions I followed Gordon Fisher’s advice (Letters, March 21) to explore again the wonderful world of poetry, enjoy its different moods, and perhaps borrow and adapt. My foray into the nation’s favourite, Kipling’s If, and Tennyson’s marvellous Ulysses resulted in:

“If you can keep your head when all about you.

Are losing theirs,

Then perhaps you don’t know what the hell is going on”.

And: “To strive, to seek, to find – more toilet rolls”.

On my own account, as per my favourite master of comic verse and unconventional rhyme, American Oden Nash:

“Bum fodder?

Don’t bodder”.

Is my dormant muse alive and well? Or am I coming down with something?

R Russell Smith, Kilbirnie.

Listen up

MY experience of friends and family with hearing aids of all types (Letters, March 20 & 21), is that they may correctly be called hearing aids but they are certainly not listening aids.

Kenneth Morin, Newton Mearns.

FORTUNATE as I am not to need a hearing aid, NHS or otherwise, very many years ago when a student apprentice with Redpath Brown & Co, steelwork contractor, I worked with an elderly plater who did. I remember one of his arguments with the rate-fixer when, after making his point he smiled and switched off; he always had the last word.

John C Hutchison, Fort William.