Soccer Relegation System

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30478, 27 June 1964, Page 11

Soccer Relegation System

Although the subject is regarded as largely a distasteful one and has been debated with unsatisfactory results for several years, soccer clubs in Christchurch will again have to give serious thought to promotion and relegation. The present position of having one system one year, another the next, the yariance based as much on personal club' reasons as on any attempt to find the best solution for soccer, is producing an attitude of “she’ll be right” when, in fact, . “she’s all Wrong.” It was pleaded in vain for the clubs to vote for a sixteam first division for this season because the standard of play in Canterbury did not warrant eight teams. It was also asked, again unsuccessfully, that clubs make a firm ruling on promotion and relegation that could not

be altered year by year, to allow every club to know exactly where it stands at the beginning of each season. Instead, Canterbury has an unwieldy, undeserved eight-team first division and no settled policy on promotion and relegation for the future. The whole question must be raised again before next season, when clubs must again vote themselves up and down. This season, the easy way out was taken. No-one was voted out, two clubs were voted up, and everyone was happy —everyone, that is, but those who wanted .a 10-club first division, which would have voted up two more clubs. Canterbury is getting to the stage where every club will be a general and there will be no-one to do the fighting.

The policy of procrastination and change from one season to another has left a situation that will be difficult, to say the least, to solve. Now if it should be decided to reduce the first division to six teams, at least three, and possibly four, clubs will have to be relegated at the end of this season, to allow one or two teams to be promoted from the second division. If clubs will see the problem other than from a personal view they will be ruthless to themselves and to each other. But this may be asking too much of them. If the eight-team competition has come to stay, then clubs must decide what form the promotion-relegation will take, and keep to it The ideal solution would be two up, two down, whether there are six er eight teams in the first division.