Yesterday, during the game, Andy Walker said some shocking things in his discussion about the dive which won Hearts their penalty. He admitted to being a cheat during his own career, and seemed to be making allowances for his namesake’s behaviour.
Apparently the former Celtic player, and now hack commentator, thinks he ought to get some sort of credit for openly admitting his own indiscretions on the park. Perhaps he thinks criticising the Hearts man for the same would be two-faced. It’s amazing how these people justify this stuff to themselves isn’t it? Better a cheat than a hypocrite.
Today Neil Cameron from The Evening Times is musing on whether Scottish football fans have the wrong attitude towards diving. He seems to think we should write it off as just one of those things that happens in the game. It’s a reprehensible idea.
I mean, whatever next? If it’s just another part of the game, even a tool of the trade, to be utilised like the overhead kick by those with the skill to pull it off, is the next move to have advanced classes in it for kids at SFA training schools? Are we going to be encouraged to analyse the best examples like we would tremendous goals? Are we going to make a virtue of it? Why not? If we’re looking the other way why not go the whole hog and legitimise it instead?
Scottish football has already seen what happens when we look the other way on cheating. It’s the very idea that financial doping, diving, EBT use and other such crap is alright, that it’s simply “the done thing” or at least an accepted standard, that led us here, that dragged us to the edge of disaster in the first place.
When Walker, Cameron and others come out with garbage like this you get some insight into how so many people in Scottish football can simply swallow the Survival Lie and the Victim Myth whole, why they believe in these things, or say they do.
Sporting integrity doesn’t factor into this; for them, and for morons like Chris Jack, whose sycophantic article on Sevco and Scottish football in the same paper as Cameron was as bad as anything published this year, football isn’t really a sport at all. To them it’s a branch of the entertainment industry, which is why so many can simply embrace the history of an organisation they know full well is in the grave.
Not everyone wants to see their team succeed “by any means necessary.” Not everyone would feel pride and celebrate tainted titles. Not everyone would take satisfaction out of watching a player feign injury, go down in the box, cheat and scam his way to crucial decisions … some of us would be revolted. Some of us would not complain if said person was hammered by the authorities because – and this is the important part – we’d know that the rules protected our club from similar stuff and from unscrupulous people who don’t mind how they win.
Scottish football has a lot of those people, too many of them as we all know well. It’s no real surprise to see the media making excuses for cheats; we’ve had four years of it. What’s worse is that this time Cameron and others seem to be suggesting we embrace this behaviour.
And that crosses a line.
Some of us care about fairness.
In Brendan We Trust.
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