Delegates Report On Sevco Sectarian Singing Another Headache For Governing Bodies

Shortly after the recent Sevco – Hibs match at Ibrox, this website and others highlighted the discriminatory chanting that was coming from the crowd during the game.

According to online journalist Phil McGiollabhain the club is set to be carpeted by the authorities as those chants were mentioned in the match observers report.

Indeed, it’s hard to see how they could have failed to be.

They were clearly audible to everyone in the stadium itself as well as those watching on television.

One Sevco fan site clearly admitted the offence, but then sought to make excuses for those committing it.

The club is, as everyone is well aware, bang to rights on this matter.

The question now becomes, “what are the governing bodies going to do about it?”

In truth, I suspect not very much.

The clubs themselves don’t want them to.

Both Celtic and Sevco have fiercely resisted “strict liability” regulations which would punish clubs for the behaviour of their supporters inside Scottish football grounds, and this in spite of a call last year, by Nil By Mouth, for the SFA and SPFL to embrace and enact such measures as they do in Europe and England.

This is a tough one, and for the first time in a while I have some sympathy for the governing body here.

The rules, as they stand, are a joke and neither the clubs nor the fans have any faith in the SFA or the SPFL’s ability to craft new ones, which is reflected in Celtic, in particular, making their opposition to this idea very public in the last couple of years.

The rules which are in place leave a lot of room for interpretation.

When Sevco was last faced with such a scenario – in February last year, after similar illegal songs were sung at the match with Raith Rovers – the SPFL did nothing because the rules state that if a club has taken “all appropriate measures” to prevent such songs (although what that means is still unclear, because, as I said, there’s no mood to make these robust) then they’re deemed to have been innocent of any wrongdoing.

That this is the second time in 12 months that the club’s fans have been mentioned in a delegates report for singing songs of a criminal nature is neither here nor there to those who run our national sport.

They have a position they can stand behind, and a precedent on which to do so, and that will be all the news that’s fit to print.

Speaking for myself, as bad as these rules are at dealing with this problem I’d rather they remained vague because too much of our free expression inside football grounds is under threat as it is, but I can relate wholeheartedly to those who are sick and tired of our stadiums having to ring to the sounds of anti-Catholic and anti-Irish hatred.

The problem, as you all know, is that with Scottish cultural and political values as badly skewed on this issue as they are that any regulation put in place will actually, itself, discriminate against political self expression if it comes with an Irish hue.

That’s depressing but undoubtedly true, and until attitudes towards that change we’re stuck with the kind of wishy-washy rules which allow Sevco’s lunatic fringe to keep on singing their war songs no matter the damage it does to the Scottish game or society at large.

But with the pre-trial hearings of numerous individuals connected with Rangers and Sevco having got underway today (more on that tomorrow), and the governing bodies almost set to play an unwilling starring role in those events, this is a headache no-one at Hampden either wanted or needed, and as per usual … it’s concerned with events at Ibrox.