In the latter part of the campaigns of Alexander the Great, around 334 BC, the renowned general held a conference with the ambassadors of the Celtae. He asked them what they were most afraid of in the world. To his dismay they didn’t give the answer he expected – which was that they were most afraid of him.
Instead they told him they were afraid of the sky falling.
Look at your history books; superstitious people have always been afraid of that.
Some, who wouldn’t regard themselves as superstitious, still do.
Stewart Regan worried about it back in 2012, when he talked about Scottish football facing “financial Armageddon.”
He voiced even greater, more apocalyptic, fears for our society when he talked about how there might be “civil unrest” if Sevco weren’t given a league berth. These kind of comments were scandalous. They were fear mongering.
And they were designed to let Sevco off, scott-free.
Some resisted. We owe them an enormous debt, the late Turnbull Hutton foremost amongst them.
A good man. A man of integrity.
He refused to bow to the pressure, and he refused to be silent as it was being applied.
He stood on the steps at Hampden and he called the SFA corrupt.
He was not alone in thinking that way, or in standing tall.
He understood the great, historic, maxim fiat justitia ruat caelum; let justice be done though the Heavens fall.
If financial Armageddon had hit our clubs, including his, he believed it was a price the game should be willing to pay in order to send a message to the rest of the world that Scottish football placed a greater value on honesty and integrity than in money.
Think on that for a moment.
On what that means.
On the noble virtue in what Turnbull and others believed and acted on.
The sky didn’t fall, but many chairmen had expected it to, yet they did the right thing regardless. They understood that justice sometimes comes with consequences and most fully expected there to be serious ones in relation to that decision.
I believe history will record it as one of the finest moments in the history of our game.
I think Scottish football would have been destroyed had those men not done what they did.
Fans would have deserted in droves. Stadiums would have been empty. The credibility on which the sport depends – and the concept of a level playing which underpins all of it – would have been wrecked and in a manner from which it could not have been rebuilt. The scandal would have enveloped us, and it would have been the prism through which Scottish football was viewed – by the only people who mattered; the fans – forevermore.
The people who would have plunged us into this darkness are still in office.
They were never removed, as they should have been, after the Sevco decision was made.
That should have been followed with a comprehensive debate on their competency, which should have ended in their immediate dismissal.
The club’s failed to finish the job.
Perhaps they were afraid that the sky would fall if they did. Perhaps they thought there had been enough chaos in that long, heavy summer, and they pulled back from creating more. For all we can understand that decision, it was without question the wrong one.
The integrity of the sport demanded not only that the effort at cheating fail but that those who tried it suffer the consequences of ever having done it in the first place.
Justice should have done, whatever the cost.
We are still paying for that failure, and for others.
The Resolution 12 case hangs over the SFA like a killing weight, that and the full impact of what was happening at Ibrox in the last decade of David Murray’s tenure. There was clear-cut cheating, even criminality, at a club that was, for much of that time, trading whilst insolvent. The Big Tax Case is in its final act right now, and should wrap up later this year. The verdict in that case is said not to be of interest at Ibrox, but it cannot be of no concern at all.
The lie this club clings to – The Survival Lie – is one so dangerous to it that it hardly needs stating.
We now know, through courtroom testimony, that either the SFA or Rangers lied to UEFA over their European License for the 2011-12 season. That is an uncontested fact, established in front of a judge and a jury, and tweezered out of witnesses under oath.
Someone is guilty of defrauding Celtic and other clubs out of millions of pounds in potential earnings.
Someone is guilty of misleading the European governing body.
Someone is guilty of lying to the Lord Nimmo Smith commission about this affair.
This is no longer speculation.
No longer the province of the Internet Bampots.
It is no longer in the slightest dispute.
These matters are back in the public domain, and with them a lot of potential after-effects.
Because justice must be seen to be done, or what’s the game worth?
I know some of our jaded hacks don’t believe this matter meets the standards of news.
They are a joke.
I meant the likes of Tom English who decries “bigots and bores” who want what he appears not to; a clean game, run for the benefit of all clubs.
That they won’t even explore these issues far less actually comment on them and demand that restitution be made is scandalous.
Fans are the only people who seem to care; Stein was more right than he ever knew.
Fans are the game, and it becomes clearer with every day that passes that our media is simply a parasite feeding on the margins of it.
Taking, without contributing a thing.
It is outrageous for these people to try to lecture those of us who care.
The clubs must push the SFA towards resolving these issues, and if the SFA won’t then the people who run the show there have got to go.
It is important to keep the pressure on, and that pressure has to start with the fans.
The Celtic Trust are our key representatives in this matter, along with the Celtic Supporters Association and their brother organisation the Affiliation. They can take a lead in jointly calling for the game here to be cleaned up, and for investigations into the EBT years, up to and including issues surrounding Resolution 12.
In their every discussions with the board these must be the core messages and those messages must get through to the people who matter.
The SFA maintains the fiction that Sevco and Rangers are the same club; fine.
Let’s see what it’s worth to them.
We must demand an inquiry into the whole matter of Resolution 12 and an answer to the question about who lied to who.
If Rangers lied, the SFA has a choice; to accept that the club died in 2012, and acknowledge that publicly or, if they insist on the fiction, then the SFA must open an immediate disciplinary case against the club at Ibrox right now and make it clear that everything is on the table including a European football ban and suspension from domestic cup competitions.
If the SFA lied then all involved should walk the plank without delay and Celtic should demand financial or other restitution on behalf of its shareholders.
It will plunge the game into crisis.
The SFA will maintain that such suggestions are damaging and threaten the cohesion of the sport; even if that were true and not more scaremongering the other option isn’t one we should remotely consider; to drop these matters and pretend they never happened.
Where does our game go from there?
When cheating has been established and proved and has gone unpunished?
How can anyone say that doesn’t matter?
There are some who will ask what the point in all this is, when the game has “moved on” and “gotten past” the arguments of five years ago. The problem is that the game never did move on. Lessons were not learned. No punishment was ever handed out.
Fresh outrages were allowed to happen.
The perpetrators, from David Murray to Charles Green, from Campbell Ogilvie to Stewart Regan, all got off scott-free.
No titles were ever stripped, no lines drawn through the history, no trophies removed from the record. It stands today as a testament to corruption and the perverse influence of one club, and the successor to that club will fight tooth and nail to make sure none of this happens.
But it has to happen.
There’s simply no choice here, and if its board threatens to close the doors then that’s a bluff we should be perfectly willing to call.
If the bullies and psychopaths in the stand want to march on Hampden then a police line should be there to meet them and the documents signed and the punishments handed out come what may.
If it wrecks their club and forces it to the wall, then sorry but that’s just the way it goes, and whatever that means to the wider game is simply something we’ll have to deal with.
Because nothing is more important than seeing these wrongs set right.
The future integrity of the sport depends on the misdeeds of the past being dealt with in an appropriate manner which puts them to bed once and for all.
Until then, this will linger over our game like a toxic cloud, poisoning trust and upping the levels of intolerance and hate to unsurpassed levels.
There will be consequences.
There will be pain.
That’s the price we might all have to pay.
Let justice be done though the heavens fall.
Think on what that means. Think on what the alternative is.
Sevco is already shredding the regulations, bending the rules on financial declarations and pissing all over financial fair play.
King might well be running a criminal enterprise from his boardroom.
The SFA cowers from even making a definitive statement against racism – I am working away on that behind the scenes, but this is now Day 11 of their shameful silence.
In other words, the sky might fall anyway as a result of doing nothing.
We can’t allow it to happen that way.
We can’t allow these people to bring fresh crisis and fresh scandal on our clubs and on our sport.
If the heavens are to fall then let it be because we tried to make things better instead of watching as it rots from the inside.
Otherwise, what’s it all worth?
What’s the point?
Who wants to pay to watch a rigged game, with corrupt leaders and clubs too scared to change it?