There was the usual ferment, bluster and abuse on Twitter as Scottish football finally took the, correct, decision to cancel games scheduled for the weekend.

You can understand some of the sentiment, we all love football after all and it's frustrating to see plans, often costly ones, waylaid. Looking forward to our Saturday fix is an enjoyable and exciting part of the week and Pittodrie was shaping up to be a dramatic, and potentially decisive, 90 minutes of action.

We are living though, in historic times.

Operation London Bridge, the codename for the protocol used upon the Queen's death, has been in place since the 1960s in various forms and plans for nine days of national mourning where various levers are pulled to represent the mood of the country. One of which is the cancellation of sporting events.

The decision was ultimately left in sporting administrators' hands as the government told them, perhaps understandably from a Conservative perspective, to decide for themselves.

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Rather than be proactive, the lily-livered leadership of the SPFL waited for the Premier League in England to show their hand before announcing cancellations an hour later. You sense that whichever way the wind was blowing would have swayed their decision. 

From the point of the view of the clubs, many of whom are simply concerned about pounds and pence rather than ideological arguments, it was a case of wanting to know what was happening as quickly as possible to ensure transport and other costly elements of an elite matchday could be cancelled with minimal financial loss. And there will be cost to our top teams. There's no doubt about it, cancelling games in 2022 does seem like a big step. 

But that's exactly why it was appropriate in this context.

Given the scale of the Queen's impact across British life and her status as longest serving monarch, it seems entirely fitting to mark her passing with a substantial response. This is not a monarchist position, just one that acknowledges the role of this remarkable woman in our shared history. It is common sense that a historical figure of such standing is given commensurate respect from a nation she served with distinction, dignity and personal sacrifice for nearly 71 long years.

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