1) Ref Caught Lying To Our Club, Linesman Resigns, Officials Go On Strike And Celtic Get The Blame
The affair known as the Dougie Dougie scandal is one of the most outrageous in the history of British football, and if you believed the Scottish media and the “official line” put out by the SFA the whole thing was the fault of Celtic.
To understand how it happened you have to go back to the 2010 season, which, as we now know, was crucial to the financial future of what was then Rangers. Throughout that period, in which they were playing for a vital second title in a row (vital if they were to survive) Neil Lennon’s Celtic were on the end of some truly mind-boggling decisions.
We had, on two occasions, already asked the SFA to explain why certain calls were made in games and were supportive of the notion that refs should have to speak to the media in the aftermath of close, or disputed, calls.
Things came to a head on 17 October that year, when Dougie McDonald first gave a penalty, and then, after a brief confab with the linesman, changed his mind about it in the match at Tannadice against Dundee Utd. Celtic won that game, so Neil Lennon’s after match comments, where he called the decision “unacceptable” were not, by any stretch of the imagination, an attempt to deflect from a negative result.
In the days that followed, evidence of a cover-up emerged; Steven Craven, the linesman, resigned, stating that McDonald had run over to him and told him he’d made a mistake and asked Craven to lie in the official match report, by saying he’d over-ruled the decision himself. Craven went on to allege a “bullying culture”, prompted by the SFA’s head of refs, Hugh Dallas.
McDonald was censured by the SFA, who accepted that he’d lied (although Stewart Regan pointedly refused to use that word). He finally resigned as a Grade 1 official.
A week after the game, Neil Lennon was left even more incensed as a disgraceful series of decisions went against the team in the Celtic – Rangers match, in which Willie Collum gave the visitors a penalty kick for a non-existent foul he hadn’t even been looking in the direction of. (I covered that yesterday as the first of the Ten Shocking Honest Mistakes, which you can read by clicking here.)
Walter Smith accused Celtic of trying to pressurise refs, and some in the media agreed. This set the fuse for an explosive series of events which have been misrepresented ever since.
Two things happened which lit it all up; one the intervention of a politician, and the other the intervention of a former one.
The first was a proposal, from SNP MP Pete Wishart, a St Johnstone fan, who suggested that it was time Scottish football adopted a similar policy to that which works so well in England wherein refs have to declare their allegiances before getting games.
This common sense proposal had widespread support, but the refereeing community wasn’t in favour of it and were determined to resist come what may.
That was nothing compared to the outcry former Labour Home Secretary, and then Celtic chairman, John Reid, provoked when he told a meeting of Celtic supporters that from now on the club would fight bad decisions tooth and nail and that “we’re not asking for special treatment, but nor will we be treated as less than anyone else.” He closed off the comments with one of his most famous soundbites; “We will no longer sit at the back of the bus … those days are gone.”
That was the last straw for the SFA’s head of referees, who, along with his colleagues, decided to use the opportunity this afforded them to go on strike, with Celtic as a convenient scapegoat, in the full knowledge that the media would buy, wholly, into the concept that our club had somehow made their jobs unbearable and that our supporters were engaged in a campaign of intimidation (for which no arrests were ever made, nor the existence of which was ever proved).
The media happily ignored that refs had talked of striking twice in the 12 months before this, and that those issues had been over money and conditions. They also ignored the fact that amongst the ref’s demands – along with wanting more cash – was a virtual guarantee of being able to avoid proper scrutiny in the future.
Hearts were one of the few clubs to realise this and condemn the stated reasons for the strike as a “manufactured controversy” which could “be used as a cover for bias and match fixing.”
The strike came and went, with Celtic feeling the full heat of a media campaign which sought to equate the state of refereeing in Scotland with that of some banana republic where match officials were scared to leave the house in the morning. Amidst such press induced hysteria, Hugh Dallas was caught sending sectarian emails on his official account and, according to one national newspaper, offered to have the refs strike called off it he kept his job.
He didn’t, and was fired for cause.
We got the blame of that too.