Since the game finished on Sunday I’ve been waiting on one thing; the inevitability of SFA action against Steven Naismith for at least two straight red-card offences against our captain Scott Brown. I use that word very deliberately; inevitability.
Because those acts of thuggery were so blatant, so obvious, so clear to anyone who watched the game that any decision which let him off would be untenable.
Incredibly, that is exactly the decision the governing bodies have made today.
They don’t believe that the Hearts captain has a case to answer.
I am flabbergasted at how they can have arrived at that conclusion.
It is an insult to the intelligence of every single fan.
I hope our club is not going to allow that to pass without comment; it would be a disgrace.
That verdict is a joke.
Just when you think you’ve heard it all you hear something like this and realise that we have not yet plumbed rock bottom in terms of governing standards.
Who makes decisions like this?
How can two elbows in the face and a stamp not be red card offences?
Even if the referee misses them – and he saw two of them clearly – they practically demand that retrospective action be taken, and when Morelos was punished last week for a similar thing you really would have thought that the standard had been set.
Now, for the record; Morelos deserved what he got.
But that is doubly true for Naismith and for some of his Hearts team-mates.
How can you even argue with that? When a ref from England was asked today what he thought of the stamping incident he didn’t equivocate; action from the SFA was seen as a certainty. A certainty. Instead we get this?
Anything goes now, eah?
As long as it’s a Celtic player on the receiving end of it, teams can do whatever they damned well please.
When Frimpong was taken out by Devante Cole we should have been screaming because that only “merited” a yellow card on the day. The SFA never bothered to do the player after the fact, although that was a clear cut act of viciousness.
Our club’s silence on it was shocking. Our club cannot remain silent here.
It is a matter of time before a Celtic player is seriously injured on the field by a player who will probably get a slap on the wrist from a “lenient” referee.
Every one of our players is now in danger of being badly hurt by an opposition boot or fist or elbow because we are not going to get protection either from the match officials or from their SFA bosses.
Is this going to be another example of our club remaining silent when we are being pissed on from a great height?
Do our directors really only find their voices when it’s time to criticise our fans or call them “entitled”?
What are our directors for if not standing up for us at a time like this?
When are they going to grow a set?
Because this kind of thing has consequences that go deep.
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