I just published a lengthy piece over on Fields, which you can read by clicking here.
I’d urge all of you to do it and share it with any non-Celtic fans you know, because their clubs allowed King and his to humiliate them, and particularly this weekend with his ridiculous “two in a row” assertions. The guy is just walking all over them, and they can either do something about it and put a stop to it or get ready for a long, dark period of irrelevance.
But those comments have refocussed a lot of minds on the title stripping case which we’ll almost certainly be pushing for when the Supreme Court returns its verdict on the Big Tax Case, sometime later on this year. The clamour for such a case will be momentous.
If Celtic isn’t out in front of the issue it will be scandalous.
The time for sitting on the fence is almost at an end.
But as long as this issue has been in the public domain, since before 2012 in fact, one question has sat at the centre of the discussion; what do we want to do with those titles? What do we want to happen to them? Do we want them, or do we want them removed from the record?
My own feelings are laid out in the piece on Fields; the actual retrospective awarding of tainted titles means nothing to me whatsoever. Yet I understand the argument which says that if they are removed they should automatically go to the club next in line. But how does that follow on, say, for a cup competition? Who is awarded them? The team in the final? Why? Because wasn’t every team Rangers beat on the way equally disenfranchised?
I don’t think you can award leagues but not cups.
Anyway, the days of darkness, like Black Sunday, will always be fresh in my memory and no awarding of titles after the fact will alter my feelings on that one way or another. Let’s face it, nobody’s going to open champagne to celebrate championship wins handed to us by a tribunal. The idea ought not even to be entertained.
I’ve read reports from players saying they won’t hand back winners medals; nobody ever asked them to. But those titles cannot be allowed to remain attributed to the club. That’s just not going to stand. The historical record has to reflect what took place here in the EBT years; that was a fraud, and the presence of the undeclared side-contracts just makes it all the more scandalous and worthy of the severest possible sanction from the league.
Yet I know that some of our fans do want those titles, believing that it’s the only way real justice can be done.
They won’t celebrate them either, but in other cases where cheating has been proved titles have been retrospectively awarded to those teams which came second in the league, and so this wouldn’t exactly be an outrageous outcome.
Sevco fans will wail and moan and bitch about this; when do they not? But this has to be done. The only question is whether the titles go to us or whether a line is drawn through them and they are stricken from the record once and for all.
It’ll be interesting to get your opinions on that.