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Mark McGhee was at Motherwell when the Setanta deal crashed in 2009 to plunge Scottish football into chaos.

He’d also been at Millwall seven years previously when the proposed ITV Digital contract bit the dust and left England’s lower- league sides in the grubber.

Manager McGhee was impacted strongly both times but says those setbacks don’t even come close to the nightmare football and the entire world is facing right now.

And he believes Scottish football has to quickly get a grip on reality and start planning a whole year without the game returning.

McGhee has been left gobsmacked at some of the ambitious forecasts that have come from sporting figures.

UEFA initially saying they were planning for leagues to finish in the summer left him bewildered.

The thought that football and sport might only have a short-term lay-off seems at best fanciful in McGhee’s eyes. And he feels Scottish football simply can’t try to plan for that as it is beyond unlikely.

Right now the game is facing a crisis. And McGhee says the best hope of getting through it is to find a long-term solution for up to 12 months as opposed to clinging to uninformed hope it might get back sooner.

He said: “There is a lot of wilful blindness around at the moment which annoys me.

“The idea we are going to complete a league by the end of June or August is nonsense.

(Image: SNS)

“The Olympics went for two weeks saying they were waiting to give a decision. Give me a break.

“People need to get their heads around this and come to some sort of decision.

“Look at a worst-case scenario. Not some in-between date which is only imagined.

“A good decision for me would be to suspend it until we can play it whenever that is. No timescales because when it is going to restart is no one’s business.

“The professionals are taking a really long-term view and the quicker they come to terms with that reality the better we can plan ahead. They have to be realistic, get around the table, look at all the clubs, work out what is required and if they can keep them afloat for a year.

“It’s actually not really the clubs, it’s about employees. The players, the staff, the people. It’s those we are trying to protect.

“There’s a quantifiable amount of money. The government has said there is an 80 per cent grant and I’m sure there can be an audit to put a figure on what’s needed.

“We’ve got X, so we need Y from government to see us through until, worst-case scenario, next summer.

“Let’s say everything stayed the same in terms of cost so, just for example you say it’s £5million a month for a year, so we need £60m for the year. Right, how much can we all contribute, what have we got, what do we need?

“Okay, we’re short of £40m, so let’s go to government and ask. And if we are up and running in six months’ time you don’t have to pay the balance of the £40m as we’re going again.

“That might help us get out the other end with a structure intact and keep people in wages.”

McGhee believes there are realistic people within the game who will get the seriousness of the situation.

Citing an example of his Millwall chairman Theo Paphitis back in his days at The Den he pinpointed the required approach.

He said: “When the ITV Digital deal went up in the air we’d just lost out in the play-offs to reach the Premier League and we were about to buy Phil Jagielka and Michael Tonge at Sheffield United for £1m. The £2m a club ITV deal was then lost and Theo said we can’t afford that and have to prepare for the worst.

“He always used a phrase – you can’t invent maths. It has to be real and we have to prepare.

“You need to take a pragmatic view. That’s what’s needed right now. You have to talk to people who can offer guidance. It’s the only way.”

McGhee used words such as “catastrophic” back in 2009 as regards the effects to the Scottish game when Setanta folded yet he realises what is happening on the planet at the moment is simply on another level.

He said: “This is different. I have my own views on it and I’m not even talking about Scottish football here.

“It’s worried me for a few weeks what might happen as regards all areas of the world and the economic implications.

“I heard a guy from the UN say this isn’t a case of fixing half the world. You have to fix it all.

“It is going to take a long time to fix.”