The winter break has caused great debate and the one thing you can be sure of in Scottish football is that you never get universal agreement on these kinds of issues.

I come at it from a slightly different angle. I’m a big proponent of playing the season from March to November, because I think it suits our climate much better and it suits our pitches too. If you looked at them going into November and even December there, they were all in pretty good nick and praised for the most part.

I think we play football at the wrong time for our climate, so to me, if we are going to have summer football and we are going to have a winter break, then it would be far more logical to extend that from December through into February in line with the Scandinavian countries.

Like a lot of things in Scottish football, this season’s winter break is a bit of a compromise. It’s giving people a taste of the winter break, just as the Betfred Cup was giving people a taste of summer football without actually going the whole way.

When the Qatar World Cup comes along, I think there is an opportunity in the lead up to that to address all these things, and we should be talking about it now.

There will be a lot of people, particularly in my own business, who might wonder what would we do for two months in the winter, but I just don’t think it makes sense for our weather, our pitches and our situation in the northern part of Europe to run the season when we do.

I think it would have a big knock-on effect of helping our clubs in Europe as well much more than it would hinder them.

I’ve heard the argument raised about what happens if a team gets to the knockout stages, but let’s give them the best chance of actually reaching the knockout stages on a regular basis which we are quite some way away from at the moment.

Getting our teams into the group stage regularly should be the priority rather than any pie in the sky thinking about anything else.

You can see it with Swedish clubs, Norwegian clubs and even Irish clubs on a smaller scale now that they have the advantage of being in mid-season form when they need to be.

I do think that the timing of our season is something that is holding us back in Scotland.