Tonight, as with so many nights this year, we have another howling mad statement out of Sevco, in relation to the Scottish Cup Final and the SFA’s decision to put their club before the beaks over the appalling aftermath of that game.
Yesterday’s SFA announcement was predictably weak.
Sevco are right on that point, and so was The Daily Record when they called the charges “farcical.”
They were, and they are. There is no punishment for the pitch invasion, for the violence that followed it, or – and this is more important than any of it – for the comments that came out of Ibrox which amounted to offering an excuse for people in its support to sing sectarian songs and behave like thugs.
Any set of charges that didn’t include one against the Sevco board for bringing the game into disrepute was going to be seen, in many circles, as a toothless joke, because their “official statement” was far and away the most damaging part of this affair. It was spectacularly unhinged, the kind of thing that wouldn’t have been out of place on one of their most demented, fevered forums. It was paranoid, insane and dangerous.
Even if we give them the benefit of the doubt and accept that some of their players were assaulted by Hibs fans – and I don’t give them that, not even a little – their board of directors justified the actions of their own supporters by likening them to vigilantes. How is that not dangerous? How can the SFA be so weak as to ignore that?
On top of that, how can the media be so weak as to do the same?
Had Celtic fans invaded one of the Hearts ends at Tynecastle on the night Neil Lennon was attacked in the dugout there is not one newspaper in the whole country who would not have been appalled and branded our fans thugs. Furthermore, I do not believe for one second that our supporters would have been justified in doing it, and I know, sure as Hell, that our club would never for one second have made excuses for them if they did.
Sevco has given its lunatic fringe license to do as it likes. Even their disgusting sectarian singing of that day has been excused as provoked; how in God’s name can any rational person argue that and try to keep a straight face? It’s a shameful assertion.
What’s their excuse for the same songs ringing out at the weekend?
Who provoked them this time?
That club lies, constantly, like some of their media partners. But the lies over this are so shocking, so potentially explosive, that they simply cannot be allowed to remain on the record unchallenged. I do not believe a single of their players was assaulted; The Record still claims, in spite of frequent denials from the players themselves, that they all were.
Not one single piece of video footage has ever emerged to prove the claim.
Not one footballer has gone on the record to make the claim.
Not a single person has been charged in relation to such an offence. A demented Sevco fan blogger has today blamed this on “cultural conditioning”; i.e. on an inherent bias against their fans inside the justice system. You could not make this up.
“The players were unable to collect their medals” is a frequent refrain in all this, and like every other one that comes out of that club and which has been adopted by its media apologists it is a barefaced, outright, unquestionable lie.
The pitch was cleared in under 20 minutes; TV footage makes that clear and the police logs and the independent report back it up. Their club, in the aftermath of a shock defeat in a cup final, and the shocking behaviour of its own supporters, decided that they would take an unprincipled, cowardly and repellent course of action, and part of that was to distort the event further by denying its own players a chance to take a bow at the national stadium, and it might well be the last time some of them ever do.
These barefaced lie are propagated by a club that cannot help itself, that cannot stop now it has started. It’s what we’ve come to expect from the convicted crook in the chairman’s office, but to hear Stewart Robertson – on his way to an SFA board seat – repeat these lies was dreadful in and of itself, because he’s either been corrupted by the prevailing paranoia inside Ibrox or was hired because it was already part of his psychological makeup.
No-one can doubt that “the Real Rangers Men” are in charge at Sevco now.
They are behaving exactly true to type.
No, as ever our anger should be directed at the media that refuses to challenge their version of events and the governing body that even when faced with a negative PR operation that would have the Chief Executive fired still rolls over, still gives in, and which cannot, even now, get itself together and call these people out.
No wonder the Sevco board has contempt for these people.
They’ve certainly earned it.