Dundee put an end to the SPFL saga last night by casting their Yes vote. The lower leagues are now closed down.
The vote also binds the SPFL to finish the top flight based on average points if it proves impossible to complete the campaign.
Don’t say it out loud folks, but we just won nine in a row.
Of course this isn’t official yet, because UEFA still have to sign off on the shutdown being final but you can take it to the bank now. The SPFL announced yesterday that football won’t be played in this country again until August; that takes care of business.
Dundee will come under real scrutiny now. Thistle have threatened legal action over the vote. But I am sure that the Dens Park club’s statement yesterday has forestalled any possibility of such an action being successful even if it is raised.
Nobody else is going to raise legal actions either.
Hearts and other clubs are going to have to take their medicine.
Dundee Utd will be a top flight team again.
And Sevco can wail all they want about the world and its many injustices. Just remember that none of their supporters or their cheerleaders cried any tears for the creditors or the taxman when they crawled out of the grave that holds Rangers.
They were shameless then and they are shameless now.
The last six or so days have been a stain on the reputations of a lot of people, and in particular people in the media who have spun or repacked conspiracy theories and helped to peddle distrust and even hate. They did so without being in possession of the facts. It has been a stain on the reputations of many clubs too, with Inverness being particularly offensive in the way their board published private conversations in the hope of browbeating another side.
And of course it has been a stain on the reputation – what’s left of it – of the club at Ibrox, in how they have shamelessly behaved. That will not end with this vote; expect more moon-howling and chest beating in the days to come, some of it coached in sympathy with Hearts and Thistle and some of it directed at the governing body itself.
Some of it might even splatter on Celtic, and you expect that because we’re at the centre of their anger and their hate.
This is all about nine in a row, which Dundee’s vote has effectively secured. But as I said in a piece the other day, the real job was done on the park, with us opening up that 13-point lead. We were not going to be caught and the desperados at Ibrox are well aware of it.
Their forums are a thing to be amazed by at the moment, as talk of boycotts and their club “bringing down the SPFL” and a lot of other such nonsense proliferates. They think there is some secret cache of evidence out there that will destroy the governing bodies and see the appointment of one more in line with their “thinking”, if you can call it that.
These Peepul are quite mad, as I’m sure you know.
Their reaction to his has been extraordinary though. They appear to believe that more than 40 SPFL clubs voted as they did solely to hand Celtic the title; was there no other reason why they took the view that this season had to come to an end? The Enemies List has been expanded to grotesque proportions.
Clubs who have never even crossed the Ibrox radar since the years when the NewCo was clawing itself up through the divisions are now being monitored for signs of “Fenian tendencies” – I kid you not, I read that somewhere – and even Hearts are being taken to task for stabbing them in the back. I did predict that yesterday, pointing out that the Tynecastle club has never opposed the idea of making Celtic champions but were only concerned with their own safety.
Still, Sevco wails and moans. In my piece last night, I marvelled that they can be getting up in an arms about a tit-bit of gossip from Private Eye relating to events yonks ago at a time when the game is on hold and our whole world with it. This is the level we’re dealing with.
Chickenshit. That’s what this is.
People don’t realise that the phrase “chickenshit” originates with the military.
In his fantastic book Band of Brothers, Stephen Ambrose talks about it thus;
““Chickenshit is so called – instead of horse- or bull- or elephant shit – because it is small-minded and ignoble and takes the trivial seriously.”
No-one has ever better summed up the Sevco mind-set, or more accurately described their behaviour in the last week.
This has not been done cleanly, or particularly well. But it has ended right.
It has ended how it was supposed to, with almost all of the clubs voting to take a common sense approach and to accept the reality of where we are and what it means.
Sevco are bucking that, of course … but they never did reality too well did they?
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