Scott Brown won his appeal today against the straight red card that was shown to him by Don Robertson at Ross County a fortnight ago. That decision clears him to play against Sevco at Ibrox on Saturday.
Celtic’s case was aided hugely by two key factors, one current and the other historical.
One was the tackle on Kieran Tierney earlier in the season for which a Motherwell player escaped with a booking and the other was the vicious lunge on Patrick Roberts which should have seen Andy Halliday get his marching orders at the weekend.
If neither of those was deemed worthy of a red on the day then Scott’s wasn’t either.
Justice has been done here.
The red card decision was a sham.
So, too, by the way, was the decision not to send off the Ibrox and Fir Park neds.
Those were red card offences.
Brown’s was an act of mis-timed aggression at the end of a frustrating spell when we’d just been cheated.
It was not a malicious, calculated act of thuggery, which those others were.
Watch the Halliday incident again; it bears repeat viewing.
He had time to compose himself and make that a clean challenge. He never even tried.
None of this matters to Sevco’s fans.
They are going bonkers, of course, crying foul, calling it a conspiracy, more proof of Peter Lawwell’s malevolent control over the game here … pick your cliché, from one of the hundreds of snide comments and outrageous slurs this has generated already and will over the course of the day and night.
My personal favourite is, of course, the old Unseen Hand … last glimpsed over Murray Park …
For the first time in months the phone in shows should be interesting!
And this comes on a day when rumours of dressing room unrest at Ibrox – which the bloggers have been hinting at for a couple of weeks – have exploded onto the back pages. Pedro has denied the stories today, of course, but then he’s hardly going to admit that he presides over what’s already a broken regime, is he?
SevcoLand would be better focussing on its own problems than trying to decipher what’s going on elsewhere. This verdict has surprised me, because I thought there was no chance of Scott winning this case but perhaps this is another example of scrutiny forcing these people to make the right call. I also thought, watching Halliday’s Special Forces style effort at the weekend there was a chance that could come into play here. So it has proved.
One Sevco fan lamented “They are openly laughing at us now …”
I wish I could tell him he’s wrong.
But actually, we kind of are.