As a correspondent whose work primarily concerns the game in Scotland, I am often asked: "What the hell is this business of splitting the league for the last five games?"

But it's not just Scottish football administrators who phone to pose the question. Fans north of the border regularly bombard newspapers and radio programmes at this time of year with their complaints and queries about dividing the Scottish Premier League into a top six and bottom six after 33 games of the campaign.

As for bemused onlookers elsewhere in these islands, the split is just another unfathomable mystery of the Scottish game, like why Dunfermline Athletic are known as the Pars, or why Hibs haven't won the Scottish Cup since Edward VII was on the throne. Not only does the top division sunder itself every spring, a team in the bottom six can finish with more points than a side in the top six - and it has happened.

Although there are proponents of an 18-team SPL, which would yield an agreeable 34-game fixture list, most fans and commentators agree that there would be too many meaningless matches played between teams without the resources to trouble the Old Firm but with sufficient strength to stay well clear of relegation.

When the top division consisted of 10 teams, with two being relegated at the end of each season, it certainly spawned excitement, but managers, players and fans alike complained that a failure rate of 20 per cent was too great and that desperation was an unhappy by-product of the arrangement.

That difficulty was solved by the introduction of a 12-team SPL with one side relegated, but if all the clubs were to play each other twice at home and twice away, the league schedule would extend to 44 fixtures, an impossible total for a country the size of Scotland. The compromise, then, was for the teams to play each other three times, then split into two sections of six for the final five games, to give a total of 38 fixtures per team.

Still paying attention? You'll wish you weren't, because now we come to the fiendish task of planning the schedule. The first 33 fixtures - in terms of who you play at home twice and who you play away twice - are allotted on the basis of the previous season's standings, and the final five games are against teams in your half of the table only. So, if the top six from the previous campaign maintain their places, there's no problem - everyone plays 19 times at home and 19 times away.

On the other hand, if a club changes from one 'group' to the other, they could finish the season having played 20 at home and 18 away or vice versa. If, for example, there are four teams in the top group who have only played 16 at home at the time of the 'split', it is impossible for all four to get up to 19.

Baffling? Decidedly so. Satisfactory? That depends on whether your team was favoured by the imbalance, or not. Fair? Well …

The saving grace for the administrators is that neither of the Old Firm clubs ever topples out of the top six, nor is either ever likely to, although Rangers flirted with the notion for much of this season. Should one of the Glasgow giants ever get the benefit of two home derbies to the other's one, the row will make the Vietnam peace talks look like a convention of Quakers.

On the other hand, the split does have one attractive feature. Celtic were champions-elect for weeks before they confirmed their status on Wednesday night, but Hearts still have a three-point advantage over Rangers in the chase for the runners-up spot and a Champions League qualifying berth.

Thanks to the split, every remaining fixture is likely to produce intense occasions for both teams, especially their final collision with each other, as well as their respective jousts with Celtic and Hibs. In the past five years the Scottish title race itself has gone, not just to the last day, but to the last kick of the ball for the entire season.

Remember the scenes from the movie Apollo 13 as the scientists wrestled with the equations needed to bring the stricken mission safely back to Earth? They are being reproduced in the SPL offices even as you read this.

Having grappled with every possible outcome of tomorrow's fixtures, the schedulers will emerge from their Hampden Park offices muttering to themselves and gesticulating to invisible critics. There is a name for this syndrome.

Split personality, they call it …

Taken from telegraph.co.uk