Well, this is a bit awkward.
The season-opening Super Cup a week Saturday? Never mind. The Arabian Gulf League kick-off four days later? Not happening.
The whole of the 2015/16 league season will be backed up a month. First match, probably September 21 instead of August 19. The Super Cup? September 14 or 15 instead of August 15.
Fans must be tempted to shake their heads and marvel at the consistent inconsistency of the country's top flight, where the fixtures list is more a suggestion than a promise. A sort of working document to be amended on the fly.
But the AGL should not be too heavily criticised. Most of its strange scheduling has its origin in the requirements of the national team and that is run by the Football Association – which is understandably keen to have its men in peak form for international assignments. Such as qualifying for the 2018 World Cup.
This current fixtures mess is sourced even further away from the league office – in Kuwait.
The first whack at a 2015/16 fixtures list was published on July 26, back when league officials believed the Gulf Cup of Nations would be played, in Kuwait, from December 22 to January 4.
On Monday, Kuwait officials said they would not be ready to put on the Gulf Cup on those dates and the semi-annual (in theory), eight-nation competition will be backed up to December 2016 at the earliest.
That led to falling dominoes, with the AGL scrambling to make sense of an unexpected set of dates.
As always, the AGL does not work in a vacuum.
Two days ago, Mahdi Ali, the national team coach, expected his players would get a league match in the August 19-21 time frame, ahead of the September 3 World Cup qualifier at home to Malaysia and the September 8 date away to Palestine.
The new AGL schedule, however it turns out, will not provide that high-calibre test, meaning national team players – aside from those who play for Al Ahli, who have an Asian Champions League quarter-final first-leg match away to Naft Tehran on August 26 – will go into the qualifier against Malaysia without a serious match since June 16.
Not only the AGL is dealing with unexpected developments. The Saudi Professional League also planned on an early start, on August 19 and, presumably, the schedule makers in Riyadh were busy yesterday.
The one upside to the one-month delay is that it removes 30 days of high temperatures from the fixtures list, which is good news for players on the pitch and fans in the stands.
It is also better for the pace of the league, because that 32-day, December-January break in league play can be reduced.
The takeaway here is how fiendishly difficult it is for a league in this region to create to a fixtures list that works.
For AGL officials it means accommodating 26 league and six league cup matches per club – but also leaving room for a Super Cup, four rounds of President’s Cup, the semi-finals and final of the league cup, the Asian Champions League, the Gulf Club Cup, national team obligations and, until they back it up a year, tournaments like the Gulf Cup.
It is something of a miracle it gets done at all. But it always does and it will this season.
poberjuerge@thenational.ae
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