Alison Connell is a journalist I don’t often find myself disagreeing with, but her latest piece, appearing in The Herald yesterday, is problematic.
It is entitled “Scottish football a backwater? Racist abuse and anti-catholic songbook doesn’t help our case.”
It follows others this week in trying to suggest that the recent outbreak of racism and sectarianism are a problem for Scottish football to tackle. In one sense I agree, because if the governing body bottles out of doing something about them then, really, it looks shambolic.
But in another way, to lay these issues at the door of Scottish football is, in itself, a scam and as much as I respect Alison I can’t let her away with that one. Yes, if the SFA does not deal with this robustly then it will be an outrage, but that’s to deflect blame away from where it belongs and we all ought to be up in arms at efforts to do that.
This falls on one club, and one club alone, one that has paid lip service to the idea of tackling these issues and never gotten real about them.
They encourage the more moronic element of their support; one director told Graham Spiers he thought The Billy Boys was a “tremendous song” and the annual bigots beano to Linfield is excruciating.
Scottish football ought not to be dragged into their cesspit.
This is a bed they made, and they seem perfectly content to lie in it, and so if we’re going to talk about shame and how badly the actions of the goons in the stands reflect on anyone the focus should be exactly where it belongs; on Sevco itself. Anything else is a cop-out.
On top of this, I think passing the buck on this one would be a tragedy for the Sevco fans who are putting their heads above the parapet right now in an effort to remove this stuff from their stands. Our media class could do them a huge favour by starting to put pressure on the club over what it intends to do to help them, and Alison has made a major error in trying to widen the scope to make it about Scottish football as a whole.
Listen, nothing we’ve seen in the last week is new.
Those sentiments have always been bubbling away amongst the Sevco support, and recent attempts to raise funds for the scumbag who got onto the park to have a go at Brown would be hilarious if they weren’t so seriously troubling.
It’s time the media stopped pissing about on this one, and I say that fully aware that a number of journalists have been kicked out of Ibrox for daring to before.
That should make the rest of them more determined.
Slap it on the front pages and dare them to do their worst. If they issue a ban write about why.
Time to lance this boil … and a good start would be to make it clear to the world that it’s on the fat arse of one club and one club only.