It’s an election year in America, and for the leaders of all the main parties, those about to leave office and those aspiring to reach a higher one, it’s now pretty much too late to polish up the CV and add to the list of achievements with which they can bedazzle the voters.
That’s especially true for the occupant of the White House.
Obama is a lame duck now. There’s no point any longer in his going “legacy shopping”, which is a US media term for a President or elected official who is casting his or her gaze around for something big to accomplish, and for which they’ll be remembered by history.
Why am I mentioning this? Simple, really. It’s because our very own football administrators are legacy shopping at the minute, over this manufactured “crisis at UEFA.”
They have some balls to think they can get away with it.
For over a fortnight now we’ve been bombarded, steadly, with this transparent guff about a breakaway league. Newspapers and media outlets have had a rare old time pushing not only that story but a lot of peripheral nonsense about Atlantic Leagues and other such stuff. With not even a fractional possibility of any of this stuff coming to pass, I’ve pondered what possible cause was being advanced by their concentrating so much attention on it.
The media, you can understand. Here in Scotland they don’t overly concern themselves with fact or logic or what’s feasible; they see a chance to string out a story and they are grabbing it. This is why they are indulging idiots like Doncaster and his new Armageddon warnings today.
But why is Donacaster doing it in the first place?
And the answer dawned on me this morning; this is legacy shopping, and with it a fascinating, and skin crawling, attempt at re-writing history.
Let’s look at what the media is regurgitating today, shall we?
For one thing, they are backtracking on the idea that these proposals are about some kind of breakaway European League.
A fortnight after they first ran that particular version of the story they’ve finally arrived where we were at the start; at the cold hard facts that such proposals are doomed because they rely on the consent first of the national associations and then of the continental governing body.
Hey they’ve arrived here late, but better that than never.
With that out of the way they’ve moved on to a brand new scare story; that national league qualification rules might be passed over and “big clubs” given automatic entry into the Champions League regardless of where they finished in domestic competition the year before.
Dare I say that this is about as likely as us finding intelligent life on the dark side of the moon?
It’s not only a daft idea – how do you decide what constitutes a “big club”, if the criteria we all accept at the moment, which is the winning of trophies, no longer applies? – but it’s so outrageously unsporting that it would be laughed out of the room if anyone actually had the brass neck to propose it to a meeting of UEFA’s General Council.
Keith Jackson and The Daily Record are pushing the idea that this could somehow happen, and to that end they’ve interviewed Neil Doncaster for today’s issue. It is one of the worst interviews I’ve ever read in terms of imparting facts and illuminating a matter of some complexity.
Doncaster might well be the worst football administrator in Europe. I don’t know what the standard of football journalism is like in, say, Estonia but I struggle to imagine a stupider hack, with such little basic knowledge and insight, than Jackson anywhere on the continent.
So the interview today is a little like Dumb talking to Dumber.
At its core is a concept so unintentionally hilarious it’s almost lethal; that of Neil Doncaster flying to Geneva to “fight for Scottish football” and … wait for it … sporting integrity!
Yes, the hypocrites at Hampden are legacy shopping alright and they hope that when these half-baked “proposals” (which I predict will never actually be proposed) are back in the Laugh Out Loud drawer where they belong that they can stand in front of Scottish football and take a bow as the people who “saved our Champions League place.”
And Peter Lawwell has the same idea of course.
As The Strategy at Celtic reaches critical mass and meltdown this is a chance for him to get some nice headlines and reinvent himself as the guy not only Celtic fans but the whole country should be grateful to.
You watch; that’s how this is planned to pan out. Lawwell and Doncaster taking the applause of the crowd for defeating “proposals” which were never going to come to pass anyway.
Between Lawwell, Doncaster and the media they’ve constructed the ultimate “straw man” to knock down so they can make themselves look good.
They have individual agendas, but they’ve found a common cause which benefits them all.
They must think everyone who follows the game in this country is an absolute mug.
These “proposals” are nothing but a shadow on the wall, but sometimes that’s enough to spook people, and that’s what they are counting on, that and being seen to have ridden to the rescue.
Lawwell’s disastrous “stewardship” of Celtic increasingly makes Champions League football look like a distant dream anyway. So what if he actually “saves” the current route by which we can reach the Promised Land? The likelihood of us managing to navigate it recedes with every day he’s in his current job at Celtic Park.
The season after we beat Barcelona we reached the Group stages in spite of him, after making history by being the only side in the tournament’s history ever to play three qualifying rounds in which we actually went into every tie weaker than we’d gone into the one before it.
But it’s Neil Doncaster, putting himself forward as the Guardian of Sporting Integrity, who really makes me laugh longest and loudest here. The notion of that man trying to reinvent himself as someone who cares about the general wellbeing of football is enough to induce vomit.
How dare he?
How dare he talk in such pious language about standing up for the Scottish game in the face of proposals which would do to European football little more than he was perfectly willing to shove down the rest of our throats? What’s the difference between UEFA giving “big clubs” a free pass and his own appalling suggestion that Rangers were “too big to fail” and that Sevco would be allowed to assume their place in the SPL?
What balls on that man. What a brass neck.
It’s not going to fly.
Scottish football remembers and when you accept that these so-called proposals are a joke anyway you can only conclude that this is a wilful act of deception on Doncaster’s part and that of his media allies, with the singular objective of making them look good at a time when he and Regan are about to be dragged through the deep mug of a Hellish legal case.
If they can make it look like they’re fighting the good fight here, they will use it to shield their reputations from the full scale of the damage they did to them with the Sevco scandals.
They want to use this to re-write history, to make us forget how little respect they have for the integrity of the sport and the rules which govern it.
But no amount of spin or manufactured controversy will take the stink off these people, and they had better know that.
Those of us who care about the game here are not going to let that happen.