If there is an Ibrox personality who has yet to be interviewed about how this season should end I do not know who it is.
They are all getting a shot, even those who can barely string two sentences together. Mark Hatelely is not a complete idiot; In fact, due to knowing a story or two about him when he was playing at Ibrox, I don’t think he’s a bad guy.
But how many more of these Peepul are they going to wheel out to state the obvious?
Hatelely has offered not one original thought, not one original take on this ridiculous state of affairs. His proffered miracle cure was to play the games, whenever, and finish the season. Even if it means that the end of this campaign is jammed on to the front of the next one.
Which would throw UEFA’s diary off kilter, expose the players to a gruelling schedule or necessitate some form of league reconstruction which I can tell you will never pass muster because clubs in the top flight simply will not vote for less games against the Glasgow clubs.
We would all like to be able to harbour fantasises of a perfect world where everything went according to script all the time, but this is reality.
In reality this season is finished.
Is it ideal? God no, of course it isn’t.
We were cruising towards this.
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I wanted it won on the park, with room to spare, so we could rub that right in. And how we would have celebrated it, and rightly so. I wrote earlier in the season that this would be the sweetest title win of my lifetime, and I stand by it … until the next one.
To win it like this? Not what I wanted. Not what anyone at Celtic Park wanted.
Yet here we are.
The times are unprecedented and they require an unprecedented response. We are 13 points clear. We have been the best side in the country. We have reached a cup final and won it, a semi-final and had to see it delayed. We have won 26 out of 30 games in the league. There is not a single person, no matter their snivelling loyalty to Ibrox or elsewhere, who can argue that we do not deserve it, that we are not worthy champions. We are.
Those who are banging the drum for finishing this campaign are being disingenuous. They know that it will not happen, but their objective is to paint the completion of the fixtures as the only “legitimate” outcome short of voiding the season, a position so extreme and so incalculable in its dangers that they no longer openly advocate it.
It is manifestly untrue, of course, to say that the league must be played out in full, as the Belgian league proved today. The SPFL regulations allow for a league campaign of less than the 38 games in exceptional circumstances, as defined by the board.
No court in the land would argue that these are exceptional.
If we had lost one club rather than the whole card, if one team had crumbled and could not complete the campaign, would we void the season?
Of course not.
Some fancy system would be worked out and the show would go on … on no account would the entire campaign come to a halt because of “38 matches” rule some seem to love quoting.
Back when this insidious campaign started I saw it as nothing more than a minor irritant.
It has swelled to become actively dangerous to the whole of football in this country.
It is nonsense like this which stops us from being to do what clearly needs to be done, which is to accept that not another ball will be kicked in this campaign. The longer we drag this out, the longer clubs have to go without. The longer the uncertainty lasts, and its that which is going to kill clubs.
Why aren’t these Peepul getting that?
Or do they just not care?
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