WITH their entire playing staff and backroom team out of contract Cowdenbeath's board of directors have a busy time ahead of them.

But with First Minister Nicola Sturgeon suggesting on Thursday that it as too early to really consider when 'mass gatherings' would be able to be allowed, when a new football season would start is something which no one can tell.

So Cowdenbeath secretary and finance director, David Allan, feels that any league construction plans the group the SPFL has charged with that task, should come up with a strategy that has plenty of flexibility about it.

However, in the meantime, with the management and players on the Government furlough scheme, he stressed the board will be setting out how, under the regulations, they can go about to fixing up their backroom team and then the players the manager will want to keep.

He said: "Under the furlough mechanism you have to be careful how you deal with matters such as looking to re-sign players, as through being on furlough people are not actually employed by the club.

"As directors the board are technically not part of the workforce so there are avenues there that can be gone down, but it is quite tricky."

David said that the general view of the board was that they would like to keep the vast majority of those who played for the club in the truncated season so the likelihood was that the people like midfielder/cum full-back, Robbie Buchanan (pictured) would be an example of them.

But there were situations coming up such as when would the new season likely start, would it be August, September, or later, so when would contracts begin.

"We are really in another piece of uncharted territory with the current situation," he said, "There are so many imponderables with how the coronavirus situation is going could develop.

"Certainly a structure that can assist in allowing for the sort of interruption which occurred this year would be beneficial, for clearly we just do not know what the future holds for coronavirus and whether or not it can be removed as yet.

"That will become clearer in the fullness of time but meantime hopefully the Restructuring Group will be tackling this and other issues so that the clubs know what the likely league structure is sooner rather than later."

On the financial side, David also said that future income streams for Cowdenbeath were also uncertain, with questions posed due to the deteriorating financial climate caused by the coronavirus lockdown, if all the sponsors the club had last season would be still be available to back it in 2020/21, and also the match sponsorship stream.

He concluded: "There is still a lot uncertainty about the way ahead but we will be working hard to prepare a path to take Cowdenbeath forward as positively as we can."