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Celtic Is Surrounded By Hate, But We Should Believe That None Makes It Onto The Pitch?

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Day Three of the Tom Boyd story, and there is talk that Celtic could be fined as much as £100,000 for his comments.

What a disgraceful suggestion that is from the hacks, who are at the forefront of this manufactured controversy.

This fulfils two useful functions for the press.

First, it keeps the pressure on Celtic, where they want it at this moment in time, and secondly, it is a useful distraction from Tom Boyd’s actual point, which is that if Beaton is not biased then he’s simply useless and shouldn’t be refereeing any game of any significance whether it involves our club or not.

We all know that Beaton shouldn’t be near a Celtic game.

The way that his visit to a Bellshill Ibrox fan bar on the night of a game against us which he refereed at that ground has been completely glossed over, and this is quite ridiculous when one considers that his officiating was so suspect that Celtic lodged an official complaint afterwards.

This brings up an old debate … that our refs are purer than pure, that talk of them being biased has no foundation.

This is not a new situation; we’ve been caught up in these scandals before.

If Celtic fans think there are conspiracies out there it’s because we’ve been in the midst of so many of these things.

The fact is, Celtic exists in a swirl of hatred … but we’re meant to believe that never once has that affected officials, and disenfranchised us on the pitch?

Let’s take a look at just a handful of incident – and there are many, many more I could have highlighted.

We Had An SFA President Conspire Against Us.

In Phil’s piece today he highlighted the Jim Farry case, and pointed out that although Farry was not the proof of a far-reaching conspiracy at Hampden, there was clearly an element up there that was so anti-Celtic it was willing to do anything to hinder us.

The Jorge Cadete situation is known to every Celtic fan, of whatever generation they come from.

We took legal action and forced from office an SFA President who had wilfully kept a top player from being eligible to play for our club during a crucial period of games, including mammoth games against Rangers. It was not a “conspiracy theory”; it was a conspiracy.

But was it a conspiracy of one?

Or did it have deeper roots?

Nobody was ever interested in finding out, although Fergus had his eyes on at least one other member of the SFA hierarchy.

Sectarian Emails And Sectarian Karaoke From SFA Officals

Another one that everyone is aware of is that refereeing head Hugh Dallas lost his job for sending out a sectarian email.

What worried me about that story, both then and now, is that there was clearly a culture of anti-Catholic feeling up there which was so deep seated that Dallas felt comfortable indulging his bigotry in that manner. He, personally, fall on the sword … but it was clear even then that he wasn’t where the problem either started or stopped.

How tolerant was the SFA of anti-Celtic and anti-Catholic hatred?

We actually had a national coach who sang sectarian songs down the phone to his girlfriend … who kept his job because “wasn’t a bigot.”

One Scotland, Many Cultures?

Aye, but some are more tolerated than others.

This Country Tolerates Anti-Celtic Hatred

We have a bizarre tolerance for hatred in this country.

Just the other day a former player outlined how Jimmy Calderwood so hated our club that he refused to wear green.

That story made one newspaper; the rest didn’t find it newsworthy although deep suspicion has always surrounded a certain match in which he was manager.

The near-total news blackout of that story yesterday was … disturbing.

In the same vein, I remember reading a Hugh Keevins piece where was full of praise for Ibrox’s own ambassador John Brown. He found humour in re-telling a story where he found himself sitting next to the former Ibrox player at a function one night and recalled Brown snarling at a waiter for bringing him a plate of green jelly.

Keevins found that amusing whereas someone else might have found it disturbing.

We tolerate more of this than we should.

We Had A Referee Admit To Lying To A Celtic Manager

Let’s not forget that the idea of referees not doing right by Celtic is not exactly new.

We had Dougie McDonald’ to content with as well; he lied to Celtic – and in the SFA report – about why a penalty kick had not been awarded to us against Dundee Utd and then attempted to shift blame to his linesman, Steven Craven, who resigned in disgust over it all.

McDonald was censured by the SFA instead of dismissed.

Every other club would have been angry, as we were, but we were somehow made out to be the bad guys.

A Ref Once Gave A Penalty Against Us When He Didn’t Even See The Incident

In the same season as the Dougie McDonald incident, Willie Collum gave a penalty kick against us at Ibrox for a foul he didn’t even see.

Watch the footage below; he has his back turned to the alleged foul, but he does not hesitate to point to the spot.

Even the commentators – including Charlie Nicholas – cannot believe that he does this.

But it was given and we never got an adequate explanation as to why.

When We Demanded Justice Refs Went On Strike … And We Got Blamed

2010, the year in which a ref lied to us and the year of Collum’s penalty decision at Ibrox, was also the year of the Scottish refereeing strike.

We got blamed for that for daring to question the performance of the whistlers.

When we were at our angriest last season, the same threat was made and the media implied that we’d put referees in danger.

Our club is slandered like this whenever we try to assure basic justice is being done … and then people wonder why we don’t trust that it is.

The SFA and the media behave a lot like people trying to sweep something under the carpet.

The culture in Scottish football does not tolerate the asking of questions, or the making of these kind of assertions.

But Tom Boyd did not more than tell the simple truth; John Beaton has made a number of baffling, almost inexplicable, decisions against us over the years and he is not the only one.

The Scottish media clings to the idea that our refs and officials are whiter than white.

But we’ve caught an SFA President acting against us, the head of referees sending sectarian emails, the Scottish manager singing sectarian songs, referees lying to us, referees giving decisions against us which make no sense whatsoever and our club being pilloried every time it queries any of this.

We live in a country, and operate in a football enviroment, where the media itself advertises the biggest derby in the land on the basis of hatred … it is everywhere, amongst the players and the managers, as the Calderwood story and numerous others make clear … but we’re supposed to believe that the officials are immune to that, that this hatred never makes it onto the park in the guise of a Grade One referee?

We would be daft to accept that.

Boyd is making a point here, and that point is still being lost.

All the focus is on him instead of on Beaton – and officiating in general – which is where it belongs.

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