Check out this tweet from Alex Thomson and the reply it got from Jim Delahunt.
That is astonishing, right?
The contempt it betrays is astounding.
When called on it Delahunt said it was a joke.
That’s where we are now with this.
That’s the absurd pass we’ve come to, where a quest to get justice and establish some order in Scottish football is treated with such naked contempt by the press.
Are these people ever going to man up, grow balls, and do their jobs, or what?
Alex Thomson, at least, believes there’s a case to answer.
But he’s an English based journalist who’s got more guts than the lot of them up here put together. I remember the resistance to his articles within the mainstream press back in 2012; the idea of them trying to lecture this guy on ethics or journalistic standards is embarrassing to this day.
But this takes the piss.
Jim Delahunt thinks cheating in Scottish football is funny. He thinks it’s funny to let it go. Or that’s his excuse anyway, what he hides behind in an effort to squirm out of a tweet which I am certain he intended to be taken at least partially seriously.
Ponder that for a moment.
A BBC journalist is more comfortable being seen to find cheating a laughing matter, because the alternative is that he believes Sevco fans will react with such violence to any attempt to strip historic titles that we will literally be in a state of siege.
Ask yourself what that portends for Scottish football. Ask yourself what that portends for our so-called civil society. It is mob rule by another name. It’s do nothing for fear of what a bunch of deranged maniacs might do in response.
That’s dangerous thinking.
It is disgraceful for a BBC journalist to joke about that.
I have always liked, and respected, Jim Delahunt. That’s what makes this especially hard to take. Because the best case scenario here is that he thinks this is a subject fit only for the fringes of sanity, instead of something that goes directly to the heart of our game.
Yesterday, in my last article of the day, I wrote “let justice be done though the Heavens fall.”
This would be what I had in mind.
See, I don’t care if there is rioting in the streets, and you have to ask yourself just what would be going through the minds of anyone who took it to that extreme. Wouldn’t it be better for society to actually confront these people on the appropriate level?
Because they are dangerous, whether their football team is winning or not and we shouldn’t be afraid to face them head-on or God knows what else they might demand in time, and even get if we’re in the mood to bow down to them.
If they want to behave like wild beasts, well I’m fairly sure the police have measures in mind for just such an eventuality.
The mentality that tweet suggests is one of pure cowardice, and I know full well that mind-set is echoed at Hampden.
Alex Thomson speaks as if the decision has already been made.
Let me tell you something; if it has been made then it’s going to need to be unmade.
There is no way in Hell that we’re going to stand down and accept that. If people want to worry about a stand-off they should be worried about one with tens of thousands of Scottish football fans, from across the clubs, and what we might do if such a scandalous abrogation of responsibility is what comes of all this.
We won’t riot in the streets. We won’t blockade Glasgow or shut down the railways. But our clubs will feel the pressure and that will penetrate to the boardrooms and in the end it’ll get to the people and the places that matter … and we’ll grind them down.
Or we’ll walk.
Maybe not from our own clubs, but image the consequences if Scottish football fans only followed their own clubs, and didn’t go to away grounds. Imagine the consequences if they steadfastly refused to take tickets for Hampden games of any sort. Imagine if we organised letter writing and email campaigns which brought the day-to-day business of the SFA to a complete stand-still. These are all options. And there are others.
Scottish football has been through five years of this.
Some of us have worked on it constantly through that time, in one guise or another. The SFA forgets that it is run with the consent of the clubs; it doesn’t exist as a protection racket for its pals, or for one team in particular. And those clubs forget they are run with the consent of their fans.
The SFA is playing a dangerous game with the tolerance of supporters up and down the country. We’re now on Day 12 of their shameful silence on the racist abuse suffered by Scott Sinclair – more on that to come in the next couple of days – and that’s but one facet of their arrogance and disregard for how they are viewed by the wider world.
Waiving Sevco through the licensing period reeks of the kind of corrupt back-scratching that led the game to the 2012 crisis in the first place.
Whatever they believe, it’s more than just a handful of Celtic fans who find that interesting; after all, our own club is not impacted by that decision. But others are, and their fans are unhappy and their shareholders even more so.
There is, and there has always been, an easy answer to all of this; hand the whole EBT matter over to an independent inquiry, one that sets its own terms of reference and which isn’t compromised by backroom deals or off-the-record promises.
Let them decide on what an adequate punishment would be.
See, last time the fix was in and we know that for a fact.
Even if you ignore the obvious con-job – that the scope of that inquiry was limited so that it didn’t include the Discounted Options Scheme, which had already been declared tax fraud and which Campbell Oglivie was up to his neck in – there’s the other element which many forget but which some of us never will.
We know that Sevco was given a “no title stripping” guarantee prior to the Lord Nimmo Smith case back in 2012.
The deal memo that proves it has been online a long time, tied up as it was in the early drafts of the toxic Five Way Agreement, which is also out there for those who want a look. It’s not that we’ve forgotten about it, we’ve put it to one side as we wait for other issues to resolve themselves.
One of those is the Big Tax Case.
Another is the Whyte trial.
That issue was never buried. It was simply put in a drawer, to be confronted later.
Later is almost here, and the SFA had better be warned; all options within the law are still on the table and some of them can open all the doors. We’d simply rather some transparency and light were allowed to flood in by people who even yet can do the right thing by the whole of the game.
In the end, though, they’ll have to, voluntarily or not.
They can dismiss this as they like, but they cannot ignore it.
We’re simply not going to let them.