It doesn’t take much, it seems to me, to get all of Scottish football talking about one subject.
Put an anti-Celtic spin on something and suddenly everyone gets in on the act.
Club in crisis?
Hold the back and front pages.
A few players have the bug?
Let’s all have a chat about how clubs aren’t doing enough and how if this doesn’t stop the game will be.
Is as pathetic as it is predictable that we’re suddenly talking about how bad Scottish refs are after a few beaten managers want to sling some mud and take the pressure off themselves by singing a familiar tale of woe; Celtic gets all the decisions.
Honest to God, you could take these people somewhat more seriously if they’d been doing this all season, at a time when another club gets refereeing leniency which is nearly jaw-dropping.
Aside from the occasional grunt of disapproval in the aftermath of a game these same folk who are screaming about falling standards just don’t want to know.
But Celtic gets a few 50/50’s – and some of them weren’t that all, but blatant – and suddenly refereeing standards are a joke and it’s all a “big club” conspiracy and people are crying about how we can’t go on like this.
Suggest VAR and everyone shuts up.
Take Gerrard, yesterday, when asked about the subject. All of a sudden, this guy who has done nothing but bitch, blubber, moan and wail doesn’t support a possible solution.
He doesn’t want to use technology lest his own players be put under more pressure and not quite so able to throw elbows and stamp on people mid-game.
Ask these people who are doing all this bitching what they want to do about it, short of shutting Celtic down entirely, of course, and they have no answers and don’t care about finding any.
But stick a microphone in front of them and give them license to slander us and they’ll spill their guts on national TV and radio. It’s a nice headline after you’ve been beat.
What’s galling is that we’ve been saying this for months; refereeing in Scotland is a joke, and it’s about time we got serious about changing that. It’s corrupt as well, because we’ve spent years pretending that such things just aren’t possible and that these officials are paragons of virtue and decency and can be trusted not even to have inherent biases.
What cowards we have running the clubs if all they’ll do about this stuff is complain once in a while, and never too loudly or too much where a certain other club is concerned.
They have two choices here and I hope they avail themselves of one of them.
They can either get behind reform, back it with all they’ve got, put their names to it and campaign aggressively for it whilst ignoring the inevitable spiteful snarking from Ibrox or they can shut their mouths and get on with it as they have for years.
Because frankly, I’m sick hearing this nonsense from them.