While the Play-Offs produce money for the club and excitement for television and the neutrals – are the Play-Offs all they are cracked up to be? Are the Play-Offs even fair?

Imagine that. You’ve played 46 league games, countless cup games, two semi-finals, and now a final at Wembley. After two hours playing, the players are tired physically, and mentally, the pitch is cut up, from all the other games played, and then to decide your entire season on a handful of kicks from twelve yards out. Penalties are great, if you’re a neutral. If you’re not, they’re not.

Penalties aren’t even a fair way to decide World Cup and European Championship second round games, but we have to pretty much live with it, because of the schedules of those tournaments makes it nightmare to have replays, and there’s yet to be a better sudden death method suggested yet. But a penalty shootout to decide an entire season? To decide whether everything you’ve worked for since you started pre-season training the previous June has been a success or a failure? I’d be amazed if anyone can provide a single reason as to why a penalty shootout can be a good way to decide a season.

I was at the Cardiff City Stadium on Wednesday night and despite the high-intensity celebrations, I could not help but spare a thought for the Leicester City fans that had made the trip.

Once you’ve been through the Play-Offs, with the extra few weeks to the season you’ve been through, while everyone else is on their post-season holidays, your players either have less time to relax after the season is over, or return to pre-season later, putting you behind everyone else. Not to mention missing out on early transfer targets because the manager doesn’t know which division he’ll be in the following season, let alone what his budget will be. So, it ends up with two seasons being affected by the post-season lottery.

Teams shouldn’t need to play 46 games to decide semi-finalists, and ignore those 46 games and just take the next three games to decide the fate of those four sides’ seasons. Call me crazy, but if you can’t make it into the promotion places after you’ve played everybody else twice, maybe you just don’t deserve to go up at all.

And if you still think the Play-Offs aren’t that bad after all. When someone floated the idea that the Premier League could use Play-Offs to decide the fourth Champions League place, the idea was pretty much rejected out of hand. Now, when you consider that this is an organisation that gave genuine thought to Game 39, maybe the Play-Offs aren’t a good idea after all. So, good luck to all of the sides involved in the rest of the season’s Play-Offs. You’ll all need it.

And if you win a playoff this season, spare a thought for Hitchin Town. The Canaries finished their Southern League Midland Division campaign with 100 points from 42 games, two points behind champions Bury Town, only to lose their playoff semi-final to a Slough Town side that finished 23 points behind them.

Written By Jonathan Moulds