If Scottish football stood any chance of peace breaking out, that ended last night when Dundee Utd’s manager quit and joined Hearts.
The two clubs are already at loggerheads over the papers which the Tynecastle club have lodged with the courts.
There might be a compensation package agreed here between the two, but there’s no chance of a happy gathering around the campfire anymore; that time has come and gone.
War will break out before peace does.
This is Scottish football now, with teams circling each other liked caged fighters. Sevco are in no small part responsible for this mess, but they are not alone of course. Hearts were always going to act in an irrational manner, based on their dreadful leadership.
They continue to amaze me. At a time when they are pleading poverty and talking about how their relegation will destroy their finances they’ve sacked one manager, brought in another and are going for Craig Gordon. As with Sevco, it’s like nothing is happening.
JFK once said that “an error doesn’t have to become a mistake until you refuse to correct it.” The list of errors and mistakes both are piling up all around us, and there are some who simply will not allow us to return to something like calm.
You see them in the press every single day, lambasting the governing bodies and trying to re-open old lines of inquiry; I’ll be writing about one of them later.
We’re not going to have calm here.
There are too many people with too much invested in their own side of this now.
The SFA is not going to step in and mediate this; if the SPFL looks ridiculous and has lost the support of some of its members then the SFA never had it to begin with. Petrie is a joke, surely the last of the Presidents who will be handed the job as opposed to having to fight for it.
On top of that, the SPFL looks weak; Sevco should have been hauled over the coals for their behaviour and they never were, and all that will do is encourage those at Ibrox to think they can take them on whenever they choose. Weakness is never a good place from which to try and get people with divergent agendas around the table to talk.
The simple truth is that people are going to feel let down or betrayed here; there’s no avoiding it.
The SPFL and the SFA are not going to please everyone. At one point it may have been possible to make it up to the clubs who were relegated – with some kind of parachute payment, perhaps – but other clubs would have screamed conspiracy over that, and made it impossible.
Sevco’s hate mob would go full-on tonto if this happened now. They might even take time off from guarding statues to march on Hampden, such would be their fury. Some in the media would simply see it as a bribe, although it would bring closure to this episode.
Hearts probably can’t back down. Having demanded a ridiculous sum, how could they convince their fans that they’d be right to accept a more modest sum? Too many people have had their hearts hardened here; this is going all the way.
Now the game is split into opposing camps … and this is all because a handful of people at a handful of clubs have used this crisis as a way of escaping from the consequences of their own disastrous decision making … and they are still making those types of choices, only now every single club could be impacted by it.
And that won’t sit well with those caught in the middle.
I don’t see how some of these wounds can be easily healed … and I see even less sign that some of those responsible for them even care.
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