Whoever the leak is from the SPFL meeting yesterday – and it could have been anybody to be honest – they have done the game a favour for once.
Not all leaks are bad.
Some of them put into the public domain facts which belong there.
Today’s is no exception.
Celtic’s statement yesterday was measured and calm, but it got the point across just the same.
The club wanted to make it clear that it stands four-square behind the SPFL executive, and it also wanted to send a message about the way our people perceive the last few weeks. The word “irrational” was the one that jumped out of the press release.
But the word “embarrassing” is more powerful still, and the news that Peter Lawwell used that word to describe the Sevco dossier in the SFPL conference call is music to my ears.
In public, in view of the media and the fans, Lawwell and the club have to be cautious and circumspect; in private, at those meetings where a frank exchange of views is not only common but almost a requirement of corporate governance, Celtic’s position on this was made abundantly clear.
And believe me, that will have swung votes.
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We are the biggest and most professionally run club in the land. Our directors and officials act with the utmost probity in these situations. The other clubs in Scotland know that. They know we have high standards. When Lawwell talks, people at other clubs listen.
For those of a Sevco persuasion, hearing Lawwell use that word yesterday will have been a deeply chastening experience.
It may even have been a little bit mortifying.
They are just going to have to live with that, I’m afraid.
Because our CEO spoke the truth. It is impossible to even imagine Celtic acting in such a shabby manner as this.
We would never have gone after governing body board members half cocked, we would certainly never have waged a bitter campaign in the media promising all manner of revelations only to fall so completely flat.
Sevco humiliated itself yesterday; there is no other way to put it.
Their acolytes in the media and other assorted fools can try to spin it as some kind of victory as they like, but the simple facts are that they didn’t just lose but they lost in a landslide, and their defeat was not caused by any anti-Sevco sentiment out there; if they’d had a case they’d have made it and if they had done so properly they would have won their vote.
They lost because their club is a joker and its directors behave, at all times, like small men obsessed with petty grievances.
Yesterday all of Scottish football saw what they are, and Lawwell, as ever, had the appropriate word to describe them.
They are a laughing stock.
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