Neil Doncaster, a man so lucky to have a job that it bewilders most fans in the game, has insulted the whole of Scottish football, but especially Celtic fans, today as he extols the virtues of the “Old Firm” fixture, and its “return”.
We expect nothing less from this joker, but it gets up your nose just the same. This is the guy who, at the height of the Rangers crisis, told the world that debt dumping was a perfectly valid fiscal strategy for football clubs to take … a quite abhorrent statement which in any other profession would have resulted in media opprobrium and his outright dismissal.
Today he’s made the quite ridiculous assertion that the steadily rising attendances in Scottish football in the last couple of years have all been about “anticipation” … the anticipation of Sevco and Celtic in the same league.
Have you ever heard such outright guff in your life? To the fans of every other club in Scotland, this has been a great four years. They’ve come back in droves precisely because the duopoly which once drove the game had been shattered.
And you know what? It’s still shattered. Sevco isn’t Rangers, not even close. A team which has made nine signings this season and not one of them involving a transfer fee in six digits; a collection of freebies and flops, mainly from the lower leagues of England.
Still, they try to make a silk purse out of this pigs ear.
Doncaster also talks about the TV deals they have round the world, conveniently forgetting or choosing not to mention that these were negotiated when Sevco was clawing its way up through the lower leagues. It’s ridiculous the lengths these people will go to in order to sell this “Scottish football needs them” fiction, but todays claims take the cake.
When even The Daily Record is mocking him for the growing absurdity of his comments, then you know he’s having a bad day. This is the third time in a month Doncaster has used this daft argument to try to rescue the standing of the sport he and Stewart Regan as good as torched in 2012. What makes it worse is that the current Ibrox operation is perched on top of a financial volcano, and could blow with spectacular consequences at any time.
Doncaster and others seem wedded to this “two team league” argument, which we know from experience is both wrong-headed and potentially dangerous. It is also an insult to every other team in the country, something that’s never stopped him in the past and won’t here.
This man is too dumb to be in his job, but that’s down to the clubs because they had – and still have – the ability to remove him, but for reasons passing understanding they won’t.
For the record, Sevco isn’t “returning” to anywhere.
This is their first year in the top flight.
And Celtic fans do not acknowledge, and didn’t for the last years of Rangers existence, so certainly not now, the concept of “the Old Firm.”
No-one in Scotland does, except the idiots who run the game … and those people who are too intellectually lazy or dishonest to accept that it’s an abhorrence that we’re better putting in the rear view mirror once and for all. Sadly, there are a lot of ex-players and managers of our own club who fall into that category.
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