So all the dithering, all the havering, all the bullshit that Scottish football has been caught in since 2012 has come to this, at last. A hearing at the Court of Arbitration for Sport, where the biggest issue of all will be sorted out once and for all.
I dreamed of that, you know. Of Celtic finally taking this matter outside of Scotland to the only people who were remotely qualified and fit to deal with it.
The second it became clear that we were being screwed out of the justice we deserved I said this is where the case would go, where it in fact had to go.
I would be delighted today except for one thing.
It’s Sevco who is taking the SFA to CAS, in the most cynical use for that body I have ever heard of in my life. They want the Court of Arbitration for Sport to rubber-stamp the Five Way Agreement, the one that says that Sevco is not liable for the sins of Rangers. They want the trophies and the name and the Survival Lie but not a single one of the consequences.
Sevco know they have been caught here. They know they are bang to rights over Resolution 12.
They are not denying guilt any longer because they can’t. They are saying that it doesn’t matter because there can be no trial. That there can be no justice. Because in 2012 they SFA and the SPFL gave them a written guarantee that this would never happen.
That is the Sevco defence here. They are no longer fighting the case but challenging the SFA’s right to hold the case at all, and if they win and CAS upholds that then they will have gotten away with some of the most serious football offences ever presented to a legislative body.
This is not “short of match fixing” this is a club which participated in hundreds of matches over decades with improperly registered players, which cheated its way to titles and trophies and lied to obtain a European football license, and which will have got away with all of it.
And the question as to why it wasn’t Celtic who took this step in the first place, challenging Lord Nimmo Smith and the Five Way Agreement and the validity of all this, will linger for years to come. If our club does not act and act robustly they will have surrendered these issues forever.
Silence will no longer avail us here. The people running our club have serious, serious questions to answer tonight. We were cheated for more than a decade. Our shareholders were robbed. This is a fraud, the biggest fraud in football history and it’s high time the people who ran our club took that as seriously as the fans do.
We’re on the verge here of seeing Sevco get “legitimacy” for a decade of rule breaking culminating in a multi-million pound fraud …
I think we deserve to know exactly what Celtic intends to do about now, or if they’re admitting defeat here and are contend to simply take and count the fans money whilst we play a rigged game with a rigged deck.