I wrote earlier about the behaviour of the Sevco fans yesterday, and in particular about the anti-SFA song they sung at the game. That song was but a small sample of the river of hatred that flows through that support, directed sometimes everywhere all at once.
It seems to me sometimes that they hate without even knowing why.
But that has barely been made more clear than it was yesterday, when they sang an anti-SFA song as the linesman’s head was being stitched up.
I blame the governing bodies for a lot of things, and wholly believe their pandering to the Ibrox club has toxified the game here. Celtic fans as a whole distrust the governing bodies in a way few others do. We have good reasons for that, and they go back a long time.
Later on this week I’ll put up the last of my A-Z of SFA scandal articles; I could have written a lot more.
Our reasons are many, and we’ve all explored them in detail. Our grievances are real, and based on actual facts and actual evidence. It is difficult to know exactly what it is that the Sevco supporters think the SFA has done to them.
The irony here is that Rangers and Sevco have been abysmally served by the governing bodies. Lax regulations and a tendency to look the other way from scandal at Ibrox has allowed issues to fester there, and gave bad people ample encouragement to use and abuse those fans and their loyalty. They are perfectly entitled to hate the SFA for that. I would understand entirely if that’s why they did. But it isn’t about any of that.
The SFA has been consistent in trying to help the Ibrox operations. The problem is that the SFA are so incompetent and lacking in foresight that they’ve hindered them instead. They, like the media, believe in glib assurances and big talk.
They accepted, on face value, the nonsense spun by charlatans like Whyte and Green and King. They let those people have the keys and run the clubs there as they liked. They ignored or bent their own regulations to give those people all the assistance they required, including European licenses they weren’t supposed to get.
And scandal and disgrace followed like night comes after day.
The SFA had not intended that, nor anticipated it. Their crime against Sevco fans is simple bad management. This is not what their supporters hate the SFA for. In fact, they’ve made it clear that what pisses them off are the limited handful of times in which the SFA has tried to do its job properly.
It isn’t just the SFA that the Ibrox supporters hate for interfering in their business, even when that interference is for their benefit. When the BBC commissioned its original show on Craig Whyte – pointing out that he was a crook and a liar and had once been banned from being a UK director – their anger was not levelled at the man himself and his deceit … it was directed at the broadcaster for daring to investigate him in the first place.
The same anger is frequently levelled at sites like this one, sites which have told them more truth than any of their own blogs ever will. They would rather live in ignorance than be confronted by difficult truths; that has long been a major issue with them.
It is difficult to understand exactly what they were so angry at the SFA about yesterday. This is the same body which invented and pushed the Survival Lie. It endorses the Victim Lie. It conspired to make sure no titles were stripped. It defends the issuing of a European license to Rangers in its last year of existence in spite of a mountain of damning evidence that this was an act of fraud. Recent decisions from its officials have almost overwhelmingly benefited Ibrox or connected parties and it is the organisation that still defies Celtic over an inquiry.
Our reasons for disliking them and distrusting them are pretty clear.
The hatred from Sevco’s supporters is less easy to understand except in the context of conspiracy theories, including the one about the SFA being “run” by Peter Lawwell.
In other words, their dislike of the governing body isn’t based on facts or something that they know, it’s based on all the petty, idiotic nonsense they believe.
As usual, they would rather have the fantasy than deal with reality.
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