Is Red Card Ross Criticising Celtic As A Unionist Politician, An Ibrox Fan Or An SFA Official?

When politicians speak they have to be careful what it is that they say.

As SFA officials very rarely speak they, presumably, are even more careful about what they say.

Ibrox fans, on the other hand, can say what they like because they are preaching to the choir, to the gallery of goons from whence they come.

With Douglas Ross, we allegedly have someone who’s all three.

Should he take care when speaking? Apparently not, because today he waded into the Celtic Dubai issue by appearing to blame us for all that’s gone wrong in the Scottish game’s relationship with the government and suggested that if football here gets shuttered it’ll be entirely our fault.

Appearing on TV earlier today, he actually said “All of Scottish football should not be affected by the actions of one club.”

And I think since he’s such a high profile individual, it bears asking which particular hat he had on when he made those remarks; Tory leader and unionist politician, alleged fan of the Ibrox club or Grade One official at the SFA?

Because it seems to me that those comments are incompatible with the third of those roles and calls into question his ability to be impartial.

Now, some are going to say that this is a useful deflection on a day when we’re getting absolutely brutalised in the press and in the public sphere, but most of the Celtic sites are in complete agreement that we deserve the kicking we’re taking.

But to be held up by this man, in this way, is pretty outrageous.

Let’s not forget that we’ve been crass, insensitive, stupid, arrogant and elitist here … but we’ve broken no rules.

We’ve committed no crimes. We’ve followed the law, and the regulations, to the letter and until someone demonstrates otherwise then there’s really no basis for these sort of remarks.

They are, by their very nature, biased.

One of the reasons so many Celtic fans are finding it hard to stomach all this criticism we’re getting is the sheer hypocrisy of some of it. Let’s not beat around the bush here; one club in Scotland, just one, has actually violated the most blatant of all the regulations since this crisis began, in knowingly putting out a team which hadn’t been cleared as virus free.

That was the club at Ibrox.

Nobody disputes that they did that, it’s just that nobody in either politics or the media made a gigantic deal out of it, although it is far and away the most grievous breach of the regulations that we’ve seen since this crisis began.

I repeat this, and I cannot repeat this enough; as stupid as it was, as self-defeating as it’s been, as morally wrong as it is, Celtic followed the rules. We had permission for the trip. It was legislated for in the guidelines.

We should not have gone, but we have not done anything that was not available to other clubs.

The trip itself did not violate a single regulation.

So Douglas Ross’ comments are outrageous.

He is an SFA official, who will probably soon find himself running the line against our club and if we allow that kind of slander from him we deserve to pay an even higher price for the events of this shocking day.

He cannot be allowed to make those sort of remarks and stay employed by the SFA, and it’s as simple as that.

He’s crossed the line and let his biases be know, and that’s not something that we should fail to hold him to account for.