Celtic are the SPL’s provisional champions. Everyone knows this. Everyone in football. We have a 13-point lead. There are only eight games remaining. They are not going to catch us, not with eight outstanding displays. They couldn’t catch us with wings.
You would have had to be living on another planet not to realise where are right now.
Scottish football is in crisis, like the rest of our society.
The pressures on all the clubs are enormous right now, and in particular in the top flight where clubs are going to have to start making drastic cuts and sooner rather than later.
Celtic has a cash surplus; we are in the best position to survive this, but even we will not find this comfortable. It is going to be a long road back into the light. Some clubs are not so lucky. Some of them are going to flounder.
Some of them are going to die.
Scottish football needs some of the outstanding matters resolved. It needs closure.
One of the reasons we can’t have closure is that some clubs are desperate to avoid the consequences of their disastrous form this season, and one of those clubs is Sevco. Most of us can understand why Hearts won’t go quietly down into the dark night, but Sevco has nothing at stake except this phantom hope – and certainly in vain – that they can still catch us. But everyone involved knows that this is delusional, and all their posturing is brazenly dishonest.
John Hartson has said this weekend that Sevco should simply concede the title to us.
It sounds ridiculous in the context of that particular club, but in fact when you examine the issues at stake here it is nowhere near as daft as it sounds, and at a time when the game flounders in crisis it could be huge in terms of breaking the logjam that surrounds us.
It would not prevent Hearts from screaming the roof down. It would not prevent other clubs from banging on about sporting integrity, from their own biased positions, but it might have the effect of snapping the SFA and the SPFL out of their lethargy.
Right now our “governing bodies” are waiting for the politicians to step in. They are wisely keeping the Hell out of it, knowing exactly what their game is. These people would do anything to avoid taking a decision themselves. It is scandalous.
Sevco does not have it in their gift to formally award us the league title. But if they were to concede that they are not going to win it, that would unstick the whole situation and we could, perhaps, move on, the whole of the sport.
It is a move of real … integrity. That’s why it seems unlikely that they’d do it.
If they did, of course, we would all have to applaud them for the gesture, of course, which would be magnanimous enough to get them some headlines of the positive variety.
Any other strategy that they pursue here is simply a lose-lose for them. This offers them their one and only chance to look good and do the right thing whilst being on the winning side … yes, I am laughing as I write that line; indeed I’m laughing at all this.
Big Hartson knows exactly how to stir them up, doesn’t he?
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