Someone else was arrested today over the blow-up dolls stunt at the Sevco game at Celtic Park. By my counting that’s three people who’ve had their collars felt over that particular offence. I know a little more about that incident than I did at the time, and I can tell you that based on that I don’t think it merits a single arrest let alone three.
I didn’t like it. It made me feel queasy.
The image just didn’t sit right, but I’m more aware now of what those who did it had in mind. Was it offensive to some? Of course it was, but almost anything that happens in a football ground will offend somebody. The idea that anyone should be getting charged over it is ludicrous.
But I want to focus on something else for now.
One of my big bugbears on this site is that the lies over the Scottish Cup Final are still being put about by Sevco and by their media hacks. I have a lot of friends who are Hibs fans and believe me, they are still absolutely furious that one of the finest days in the recent history of their club was, and is still, overshadowed by stories about how their supporters invaded the pitch motivated by anti-Sevco hated and assaulted the club’s players.
Dozens of people have been arrested over the cup final violence. The police haven’t exactly been idle on the matter. They’ve moved slowly because they had to; the size of the investigation alone is huge. But they’ve put a large number of people in handcuffs over it, which tells you they’re not sleeping on the job.
They’ve moved even faster here, to find the people behind the effigies and get them charged. It was an easier investigation, to be fair, but you have to be in awe at how fast they’ve worked. With CCTV and television footage to guide them, that’s to be expected.
I just find it odd that with the cup final having been many months ago that the most serious alleged offences have yet to result in arrests. Not a single Hibs supporter has been charged with laying hands on a Sevco player. Not one. Which seems, I dunno, a bit unusual considering the comments out of their club about every player being subjected to bad treatment and the Keith Jackson shrieking headline alleging the same.
It’s almost as if the police can’t find the proof, and that sort of leads one to conclude that perhaps the reason they can’t is that there just isn’t any to find.
That story is not supported by a shred of available evidence.
In spite of a hundred camera angles and uncounted numbers of fans with mobile phones filming footage I have yet to see a single piece of it which shows a Sevco player being hit by a Hibs fan. Some were taunted, some had fans dance around them like pigs heads on a pike, but not a single frame shows one being assaulted. I find that remarkable in the digital age, where it seems that everything has been caught and recorded for posterity.
That can only lead you to one conclusion, and it’s that Sevco’s board and manager and players and other officials lied, that their fans are basing a torrent of paranoia and hated on that lie and that the media has supported, endorsed and inflated that lie.
But none of that can have happened, can it? Because isn’t this the club the media and those who run Scottish football keeps on telling us that it needs? That we depend on? Can they really have invented such a heinous and deplorable piece of fiction to deflect from the failings of a manager and his team, in the aftermath of a bad defeat?
Yes, of course they could. They did.
This is a club run by Dave King, after all.
This is what Scottish football has to put up with.
But maybe not for much longer.
