Isn’t it amazing? Just a few months ago, everyone in Scottish football was dismissive of the very idea of inquiries. They weren’t on anyone’s agenda. Now Partick Thistle are demanding one into the Hearts stadium fiasco. They aren’t going to get it.
But they should.
Because football governance in Scotland is a joke.
In the aftermath of the game, Thistle’s manager claimed it would never have happened had they been playing Sevco and I agree wholeheartedly.
The governing bodies would never have allowed that club or their fans to be quite so shockingly, and obviously, regarded as an afterthought.
That match would have been postponed or moved with days to spare or if Hearts had insisted on playing the games they did they should have had the matter taken out of their hands with 12 hours to go and the match declared forfeit and the points awarded to Thistle.
Nobody in the power structure – if you can call it that – ought to pretend otherwise.
Archibald said he wasn’t speaking from a “small club mentality.”
He said traffic considerations would have been the over-riding factor.
Why are these people so scared to just state the bloody obvious?
Scottish football is run for the benefit of a handful of teams, and Thistle, unfortunately for them, are not one of those teams. The politics of the moment was all against them. They were treated as unimportant because that’s how the SPFL saw them.
I find it hard to believe that no-one in Scottish football was unaware of this before the weekend.
The suits at Hampden have never hidden their utter disdain for ordinary fans, of all clubs but a lot of those fans haven’t been particularly bothered by that because it hadn’t affected them directly. To the average Thistle fan, being miles behind Celtic is no different than being miles behind Rangers was and if one club cheated its way there and another simply had a bigger support and better infrastructure, what did that matter to the final equation?
Thistle were never contenders. If it hadn’t been a doped up Rangers lording it over them it would have been someone else, probably us. When you are on so far from the top in any structure, what does it matter what those right at the apex did to get there? EBT’s, bribery, corruption, Dave King, Craig Whyte, Charles Green, David Murray, Dermot Desmond’s tax affairs, Fergus McCann’s court cases, Peter Lawwell’s heated driveway … it’s all gossip, right?
They want an inquiry here to find out what? Why they were treated this way? An inquiry should happen, but at the end of it will be one simple fact that is inescapable and beyond debate and if they didn’t know it already I hate to be the one to shock them.
It is simply this; no-one cares what happens to clubs like theirs.
Does anyone think the league structure would have been bent out of shape and rules subverted and ignored and the game itself brought to the brink of utter ruination had what happened at Ibrox happened at Firhill instead?
Everybody knows Thistle would have been allowed to die, to circle the drain and then swirl straight down it and that no-one would have lifted a finger.
Furthermore, club chairman are well aware of the broad contours of the scandals many of us have said unfolded in tandem with the liquidation of Rangers. They just don’t care, because those scandals didn’t directly affect them. All they did was poison the sport.
All they did was create an impression inside Hampden that the blazers there could do whatever they liked.
And that’s why we have weekends like the one just passed.
The clubs are run by weak people who allow the Regan’s and Doncaster’s to walk all over them and subvert the regulations as they see fit. Hearts are a bigger club than Thistle, and in the perverse world of Scottish football that confers all authority, that is what trumps every other consideration.
And clubs are content for it to be this way. They are happy to be pissed on from a great height, to complain only when it starts to smell. This is what they have allowed to happen. This is what they have allowed to become the governing standard for the “running” of our sport.
I don’t want to come off unsympathetic here, but in point of fact I’d have more of it if their club had been a leading light in trying to reform the game and get the corrupt jokers who run it out of those offices of theirs. It is scandalous what happened to Thistle this weekend, but it never would have happened had their club’s leaders possessed a fraction of backbone and done what needed to be done when Celtic called for a grand inquiry.
Thistle said nothing.
They did nothing.
My sympathy is limited because of it.