Yesterday, Celtic released a statement I thought was amongst the best I’d ever read from the club; it was an unequivocal denunciation of the Lord Nimmo Smith verdict, the governing bodies and the cheating at Ibrox which lasted more than a decade.
Celtic made it clear that they believed the matter had been opened for action to be taken, and they were not asking for it but making it clear they expected it. It was a clear to a demand as they could put out.
Celtic are not playing the humble supplicants here; be under no illusions about where we stand. The silence of the last few years has been revealed for almost unbelievable patience, in the knowledge that this would come out the way it was meant to.
Our club deserves enormous credit for that, and for the statement. At last, at long last, we are all now completely on the same page when it comes to this stuff. There is no “moving on” here, there is no more sitting at the back of the bus, as John Reid once put it. We never were. The club was ready for this moment. I believe they know what comes next.
The SFA responded within hours with a statement which some around me here by the holiday pool took to be an outright rejection; it actually wasn’t. Like everything else, the SFA is hedging, their weakness evident in the words “ … at this time” which ended the statement. The simple truth is, if Celtic want this issue reopened then it will be.
But not by the SFA.
I am sure the club knows the SFA has not the slightest intention of stripping titles or agreeing that it be done. All of our fans certainly do. But I wonder how many of our fans realise that this isn’t about protecting Sevco or what was Rangers; what would be the point?
Sevco might wail and moan in the event it happened but, frankly, their bitching would have no teeth. They have gone out of their way to abuse other clubs, to assert themselves as being somehow superior to the rest of Scottish football, and now that they need friends I expect them to find none.
Rangers itself is gone, dissolved in the acid bath of liquidation. All that remains of them is tied up in the Ibrox operation which was just humiliated in front of the whole of European football. The SFA isn’t about to act a shield in front of the people who currently inhabit the boardroom and the dressing room over them; they are an embarrassment to all of us.
Yesterday’s SFA statement was a clear attempt to control the narrative of this; it wasn’t so much a response to Celtic’s as it was heading off the questions they know are inevitable the minute any of the member clubs demands to know what’s gone on here. If the SFA can keep the focus of this on Ibrox and on a certain interpretation of the rulebook – the farcical suggestion that there is nowhere for a case to go made me actually laugh out loud – then it’s not on their own role in all this. Because yesterday’s statement was all about that; it was an act of self-preservation.
At times like these I find a historical perspective particularly useful.
Richard Nixon’s entire government was brought down by a handful of brave journalists who initially started out looking into a simple robbery at the Watergate Hotel complex. When they found a few connections to the intelligence community it seemed the burglary was only the least of it, but it was the shifty behaviour of those connected to the White House that convinced them to keep digging, and in the subsequent scramble to keep it all under wraps and cover their own backs the members of the administration – including the President himself – committed the crimes than ended with over 90 of them facing trial and Nixon resigning in disgrace.
“It’s the lie that gets you,” Nixon is said to have said, in reference to earlier events, those which aided his career. The lie is certainly what got him.
Who knew what, where and when? That’s always been the question. Did the SFA actually aid Rangers in tax fraud? When Phil McGilliobhain broke the initial story and the RTC blog started putting facts out there, what happened at Hampden? How seriously did they take it? Did they open an immediate internal investigation and what did they find?
Is that how it began? With Ogilvie appearing in front of the other board members and telling them that the last ten years had been a lie? In those circumstances it’s all too easy to imagine a spineless wonder like Regan deciding that the “good of the game” couldn’t be served by going after one of its most influential clubs, and invalidating all those titles. You could see how he might worry about what the response might be in Nyon.
They knew, before the Nimmo Smith inquiry sat, exactly what had gone on and probably for a long time before. And then they allowed Ogilvie to lie in front of that committee whilst still wearing an SFA blazer. They allowed Sandy Bryson to get up there and basically concoct the most ridiculous defence of cheating ever heard; we couldn’t punish it because we didn’t know it was cheating at the time. It is scandalous.
And now they are caught in the trap they’ve made for themselves, where any attempt to punish Rangers from those offices would leave those at Ibrox now, who’s entire existence is based on the Survival Lie, only one recourse in the event of that …. to bring the whole house down with them. Because those on the Ibrox board right now know what the SFA’s role in this was, and what its role in other events was too, by virtue of the tapes Dave King bought and which played such a role in the Craig Whyte trial, which ended in farce earlier this year.
The SFA played a role in this affair; they either helped Rangers do it or they helped them conceal the scale of it, in a damage limitation exercise after the fact. Either way, they are the last people with the moral right to sit in judgement of this affair. An inquiry, which to my mind is what Celtic are asking for, can’t ignore that … if it was to have validity it would need to have investigating the SFA itself as part of its remit. Nothing less will do.
Their statement yesterday was disingenuous nonsense, and Celtic will have been well prepared for it because the club knows, as we do, that the SFA is not fit to deal with this issue; they are not part of the solution because they are part of the problem, perhaps even the greater part.
We were not looking to them for leadership here; we have those “leaders” firmly in our sights. They helped to do this. They were either party to the cheating or accomplices after the fact. It’s their own former President whose sticky fingerprints are on the Discounted Options Scheme. For them to pretend they can adjudicate this is ridiculous.
This is about them as much as it’s about Murray.
This is the most corrupt football association in Europe, and that’s what the starting point of any inquiry ought to be.