This weekend, a sports scandal erupted in Australia over cricket.
Not a sport in which I have the remotest interest, but the latest to fall victim to cheats within its ranks. And as per usual people in the governing bodies have acted fast. The Prime Minister has weighed in too, but the wheels of justice were in motion before his intervention.
I know exactly nothing about cricket and I am not disposed towards digging into the fine details of the scandal. I know the Australian body which runs cricket is reluctant to sack their head coach but that body which governs Australian sport as a whole has demanded that he be fired. With the involvement of the PM I think that’s a stonewall cert.
And this is how it’s meant to work. The authorities are supposed to swoop on cheats and right the wrong wherever possible. Do you think the coach over there will ever get a job with the national association again? Right now, Alex McLeish is manager of Scotland’s national team and not only did he have an EBT but he admits, freely, that without the use of that tax scam his club would not have been able to keep pace with us.
Forget that this guy walked out on the national team once before – this guy is a cheat and was up to his neck in a tax fraud. Tan McManus wants us to “move on” and has tried to turn this into a Celtic-Sevco issue.
Do these people have a morsel of backbone?
Where are their balls?
When do they get off the matt and call this what it is?
I know of one – only one – sports federation which has been caught in a cheating scandal and who defended the cheating. It was the Russians. All of the cheating athletes later lost their medals and when the non-cheats from that country competed in the Winter Games recently they did so without a national flag. In spite of shame, disgrace and the stripping of titles guess what happened? Another of their athletes was caught doing the same damned thing.
And you know why? Because the Russian governing bodies were in on the act. I have no reason to believe that doesn’t also apply to the SFA and when you consider that the Russians paid for their cheating and have continued to do it anyway it makes you wonder what’s been happening at Ibrox that we don’t know about because they weren’t punished at all.
I am tired of having this debate. What happened at Ibrox was not punishment; it was consequences. They ran out of money, they went into liquidation and Sevco were made to start at the bottom like any new club would be. Aside from that, Rangers wasn’t punished in any way shape or form. The tainted titles remain on the record.
Australian cricket is in a bad place just now, like cycling has been and as English football was during the match fixing scandal and Italy during the refereeing one and Germany during its … I could go on and on. In each case they faced the problem head-on by admitting guilt and punishing wrongdoing.
They knew, you see, that the sport couldn’t get past it unless it was dealt with robustly.
Australian cricket will survive by doing the right thing.
It’s not that in Scotland we tried to fudge our cheating scandal; it’s that our governing bodies tried to brush it under the carpet and now want to ignore it completely and cowardly members of the press corps have given them a pass for doing it.
When we get real and tackle this we can move on.
But not one day before.
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