IMAGINE for a moment that you’ve booked tickets for a West End show for yourself and your wife.

You are just settling into your seats when the curtain opens and the theatre manager announces: “Ladies and gentlemen, we hope you don’t mind but we’ve decided to give three of our leading actors a rest tonight.

“We thought it would be nice to give a chance to their three understudies.

“Just in case they don’t perform as well as we hope, the three leading actors will stay in the wings ready to come on if they are needed.”

Of course, I hear you say, it couldn’t happen. The audience would demand their money back.

And yet that is exactly what is happening week after week throughout the country – not in theatres but in our football stadiums.

Our main culprits are our Premier and Championship team managers who gamble on the weaknesses of the opposition and when it suits them leave some of their best players on the bench, mainly in FA and League Cup games which are considered less important than the fight for promotion or the battle to avoid relegation.

That means the big clubs resting many of their top players and, in so doing, treat their own supporters and the opposing team with contempt.

Just look at the FA Cup fourth round ties involving Arsenal, Tottenham, Leicester City and Liverpool, to name just four.

I was delighted that Tottenham and Liverpool came unstuck, Arsenal only just managed to scrape through and Leicester City got the replay they never deserved.

If I had been one of the 4,000 Leicester City fans who made their way up the motorway on Saturday and paid good money to see their team in FA Cup action against Huddersfield Town I would have been furious to find three of their best players were on the bench and another wasn’t even in the squad.

The name of the game is supposed to be entertainment.

Had Leicester put out their strongest team right from the start and given the team’s fans their money’s worth they would probably have won the game and it’s a pity that Huddersfield just failed to get the win their efforts deserved.

So, how do we bring an end to this unsavoury situation?

The answer, surely, is for the football authorities to take action to ensure that every club involved in the FA and League Cup competitions always fields their strongest team.

Of course, that system would be open to abuse with clubs claiming their top men are injured. But if they did that, then they would not be able to name them as substitutes.

And heavy fines – and I mean heavy – would be imposed on any club deliberately flouting the system.

For years fans have been given a raw deal by our big clubs.

It is about time they made their supporters their number one priority.

Stan Solomons

Huddersfield

Health service fears

I WONDER how many of the residents of Holmfirth, Meltham, Denby Dale, Marsden and Slaithwaite know they now live in a place called ‘Greater Huddersfield’.

This new piece of NHS bureaucracy has been foisted on us by David Cameron and his cronies – including local Conservative MP Jason McCartney who was happy to support the controversial NHS Bill despite many local objections. He seems to have forgotten his leader promised ‘no more top-down reorganisation of the NHS.’

Just in case anyone thought transferring the ability to buy NHS services to GPs was a good way of reorganising the health services, the creation of this ‘Greater Huddersfield Commissioning Group’ from 40 GP practices shows the scale of the way this new system will work.

This is not about your friendly local GP taking a local decision, it is about constructing a top-down system where financial interests will come first.

Private sector firms are lining up to ‘help’ GPs manage their bidding in the new Commissioning Groups.

When spending our taxes for us, this group will have a duty to consider buying from Virgin or Serco or some other private company.

Facilities are bound to fragment as local hospitals lose out to big firms with supermarket style marketing ideas.

We saw it happen with our water, gas and electric companies when Mrs Thatcher privatised them.

By supporting this huge change to our NHS, Jason McCartney proves he shares her dogma.

I will be writing to the Greater Huddersfield clinical commissioning group to ask them to add a clause to their constitution limiting the extent to which they work with private companies.

I am doing so because I don’t want my taxes turning into big profits for shareholders.

I am heartened by the fact that nearly 1,000 people from Greater Huddersfield have signed the 38degrees petition asking for similar limits – even though I am sure the majority of local residents don’t realise that is where they now live.

Anne Baldwin

Huddersfield

Help our petition

I’M writing on behalf of people suffering from pulmonary fibrosis.

It’s a delibitating disease which affects the lungs and anyone can get this.

There are quite a few young people with it. Alan is one from Yorkshire aged 39 years, a lovely young man still trying to work part-time with two young children in urgent need of a lung transplant but the government won’t fund it.

We need signatures to send to the government to ask them to at least please acknowledge this awful disease. The outcome of life is three to five years – more if you are lucky – so if your readers would please sign this petition just the click of a button may help save lives of the future.

The only signatures we have so far is 795 and the government wouldn’t even look at that unless its in the thousands.

The petition is

http;//epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/39490

P Pickering

Denby Dale