Scott Sinclair won the PFA Player of the Year Award last night, at a ceremony in Glasgow where the great and the good of the Scottish game were gathered.
There has rarely been a more deserving winner for this trophy than Scott, who is the most exciting signing a Scottish team has completed in many, many years and I say that as a huge fan of Big Moussa, who can consider himself unlucky only to have taken the award for best goal.
Scott Sinclair is a football manager’s dream.
He plays in that position where a player can hog all the headlines and get all the glory, an attacking role where his blinding pace and eye for goal proves to be a deadly weapon. In Brendan he has a manager who intrinsically understands how to get the very best out of him.
The combination of the two is deadly.
I was a fan of Scott Sinclair since before he pulled on the Hoops. When I heard we were interested in signing him I was over the moon, but I never expected us to pull it off. It feels as if he’s been at Celtic Park his whole career now; His goals have played a huge part in our title-winning, all conquering season. His general play has been outstanding.
There are players who I absolutely detest on a personal level; Neymar is one of them, for his repeated antics.
Diving, cheating, trying to con refs.
But you could watch him play the game all day, every day. You would pay to do it too. Even when top players come up against our team, there’s a part of me that can maintain enough detachment to admire their skills, even as I want to hide my face so I don’t have to watch.
What kind of mentality subjects a magnificent talent like this to racist abuse?
You try to grasp it.
You try to understand it.
It defies you, it really does.
Scott has probably never faced this sort of thing before in his career; it’s a throwback to a darker time and even looking back on those days I can’t wrap my brain around what it was all about, what “fans” who engaged it thought they were doing.
There’s a moment in Nick Hornby’s book, Fever Pitch – I’ve recommended this book 100 times, and do so again without hesitation – where he talks about what it was like to stand on the terraces in the 80’s surrounded by that stuff. He said it would be there (and maybe in some grounds it still is) whenever an ethnic player makes a mistake; the shouts go up and even when the most toxic insults are being levelled at the poor sod the crowd always seems to sigh with a weird sense of relief if amidst all the screaming and heavy invective – stuff I couldn’t write here and get away with it – that there’s no racial element to it.
He tells a story that sums up, instantly, the utter insanity of racism at the football;
“One night I turned round angrily to confront an Arsenal fan making monkey noises at Manchester United’s Paul Ince,” he says, “and I found that I was abusing a blind man. A blind racist!”
I find it as absurd as he does, but on another level not so much. All racists are blind. It’s the only way they can do what they do and believe what they believe.
What I find abhorrent is that we’re now nine days on since the shocking events at Ibrox and our association is yet to utter a word in condemnation of those events, or in support of Scott. I am sure the player himself is past this, and would rather the matter dropped, but as I said yesterday I am of a mind to keep on poking the SFA with this until they say something.
Scott Sinclair, love and respect to you. You’re part of this Family, and the video I’m including with this, of the fantastic Green Brigade tribute to you at the end of the weekend’s game, is the least of how you’re viewed by everyone who follows our club.
It is a disgrace that the governing bodies have yet to support you.
I really do want to keep jabbing them with this shame until they do.
The clock keeps ticking.
Nine days and counting.
Nine days of silence.