Yesterday, the SFA press office issued a statement. It was in response to a critical press release from Celtic Park. You just knew there were people actually working there; you just weren’t sure what it would take to jerk them into action.
We might have known it would simply involve Celtic questioning a decision they’d taken.
That’s enough to get them moving.
It has been eight days now since Scott Sinclair was the target of racial abuse at Ibrox. What was originally thought to have been the actions of one person turned out, in fact, to be several. We don’t know that there aren’t others; there probably are. In the time since, Celtic fans have shown tremendous solidarity with the player, as has the club. The PFA has weighed in. But the governing bodies have said the sum total of nil.
The longer their silence goes on, the worse it will look.
Right now, I am minded to write a different article on racism every single day until they say something about this and if that means I’m still writing them in a year’s time then so be it. My thinking right now is that the headline will not change except for the number of days;
“The SFA Refuses To Slam The Racist Abuse Of Scott Sinclair” will be in all of them.
Those articles would probably become boring very fast, but I hope you’d all continue to share them because with every single one of them the shame and the disgrace of the Scottish Football Association would be magnified.
They haven’t even bothered with a sub-standard, generic “the Scottish FA notes with dismay … we abhor racism in all its forms …” blah blah piece. Are we to conclude from this that their commitment to anti-racism initiatives is less than stellar?
Hell we’re not even suggesting they do anything about this … only that they say something.
SAY SOMETHING.
Later on this month, it’s entirely probable that Scott Sinclair will collect the Scottish Player of the Year award. At Hampden. In front of all these gutless wonders who have refused to utter a single word in his defence, or in defence of football in general.
I contacted KickItOut about this.
We’ll see if they are interested.
We’ll see if they can shame our association into at least issuing a statement.
The SFA is a joke, we all know it.
But this is appalling even by their shameless standards.