I was glad this morning to see that Paul Brennan of CQN had picked up on the nuances of Stewart Gilmour’s statements about Neil Doncaster last night. Whilst I welcome the intervention of anyone who calls the Doncaster appointment to the SFA board the ridiculous farce that it is, I didn’t miss what the ex-St Mirren chairman was getting at.
How could I? I remember him spelling it out before, and I remember laughing my ass off about it (and writing about it on this blog) at the time. It was the old push of the “Unseen Hand” nonsense, the idea that Celtic really runs Scottish football through Peter Lawwell.
That’s what bothers Gilmour and others. This idea that we have undue influence on the governing bodies. In spite of that being demonstrably false – imagine how different the SFA would look, for a start, if it were true – people (or rather Peepul) still persist in this.
Gilmour has issues, of course.
They go beyond mere paranoia about Celtic. There’s ample information in the public domain which suggests he was willing to do some kind of grubby deal with Charles Green back in 2013, over league reconstruction (he threatened to sue over that allegation) but the very idea of Peter Lawwell seems to make him crazy.
A lot of people believe in this Unseen Hand nonsense; I’ve written about it several times, but I still can’t quite wrap my brain around the idea of it.
I have also written about how Neil Doncaster survives because, for some reason, Celtic and other clubs seem to like him.
But Gilmour is suggesting again that we somehow “control” Doncaster, which means in many ways he’s blaming us for the mess that Scottish football is in.
But if you read Peter Lawwell’s statements after Regan’s departure you’ll know that there’s frustration at how things have gone at the governing bodies. Does that sound like a guy who has too much influence, or believes his advice and ideas were ignored?
There are people who gain from pushing The Unseen Hand lie … they are not people friendly to our club. And these people are on manoeuvres. They know that changes are coming; they are paranoid that those changes are going to be real and they are particularly paranoid about who is going to be pushing them. It may well be that they are right to be.
But on top of that, you can believe these people will be rallying support behind their own favourites.
Some of those people are already inside the walls.
I don’t have to tell you how important it is that those people are kept far away from the levers of power, and I daresay Celtic do not need an education on the subject either.
The power struggle for control at the SFA is going to be fearsome.
Those who want to frame it as a power-grab by Celtic have struck first, in an oblique way, in a way that doesn’t make sense when you look at it right, but they know that part of this is the PR war and so it doesn’t have to make sense, it only has to be believable to certain people.
Stewart Gilmour has spoken not because he is concerned with the good of the game but because he wants to make sure the future of it doesn’t fall into the wrong hands.
Unseen hands. Our hands.
Nothing scares these people more.
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