Last night I expressed disbelief about the Ajeti charge.
Celtic have already declared their intention to vigorously oppose it. Good.
They should also be asking serious questions about the process that got us here though, because it’s just ridiculous.
I’ve watched that footage a hundred times.
The contact on the player is clear. The SFA has no way of knowing if the contact was enough to send the player down.
All sorts of things factor into making a player fall under a challenge. Momentum. Pace. Balance.
The least touch can send you down if you’re running at full-tilt and slightly off centre … even if you think it’s of “the soft variety” as many of our enemies in the press have suggested, that’s a long way from inferring cheating.
The decision to cite him is scandalous.
Celtic needs to be seriously questioning this process.
For openers, where the Hell did this citation spring from?
Who pushed it into the SFA’s arms?
I know exactly who pushed the Brown incident into their vision; the press and the club from Ibrox. To go after Ajeti appears petty and small and blatantly designed to appease those who wanted the captain banned.
Celtic have to know this.
Our club cannot be oblivious to it.
It’s all well and good opposing the case but we need to get to the bottom of how it was raised.
This doesn’t even feel like “trial by Sportscene”; having repeatedly watched the incident I cannot fathom how we got here except that Brown was cleared and they needed something to make up for it.
Someone pointed out to me last night that diving is a yellow card offence at best.
So how come we’ve been offered a two match ban for it?
Because the ref gave a penalty?
This brings us back to what we’ve talked about here before; referees make calls, on the spot, and if those calls are incorrect (or worse) then the clubs and players get punished retrospectively.
How come the referees don’t?
If the claim here is that the ref got it wrong (and that’s the logic of it, and it’s the second incident involving Clancy in a week to be overturned) then what’s his punishment for it going to be?
This is just one of the things we should be asking.
His dire performance for the Hibs game should have seen him carpeted and banned from taking on SPL fixtures for a time; instead of that he was rewarded with a televised match on Sky.
Clancy didn’t’ get this decision wrong though.
Clancy is one of the most biased men in the business and even he thought it was a decision we couldn’t not get, especially as he had denied us another stonewaller shortly before.
But his pals at the SFA apparently don’t think we should get any decision.
We are being punished for that.
The video evidence is clear that there was contact.
It’s clear.
And if there was contact then there’s simply no way that Ajeti should be cited.
He went down too easy? Prove it. I mean maybe he did and maybe he didn’t, but since we have the ludicrous “not proven” verdict in Scottish football, that’s the worst verdict they can give him.
They can’t prove otherwise and they know they can’t, so the case is an absolute joke.
The committee which reviewed the incident must know that, so they are screwing with us just because they can.
Our club really cannot accept that.