How tiresome Ally McCoist is. Imagine promoting the idea that the Scottish Cup Final should be moved to Celtic Park or Ibrox so that fans can attend.
How pitiful to see him making a pitch which he thinks is a win-win for him and for his favourite club either way. You know why he’s making that pitch? Because if Scottish football is somehow stupid enough to go along with it then it is a win-win for them.
That’s not why the game shouldn’t fall for it, but it’s a start.
How many of us want to contest a Scottish Cup at his club’s favourite ground? How many of us want to see a scenario where the showpiece event at the end of this awful campaign dumps a pot of money into their lap? We’ll pass on that, right guys?
Worse, how many of us want to see that club rolling into Celtic Park to celebrate their own campaign, if that’s what it comes to? We’ll pass on that one too, yeah?
McCoist thinks he’s so smart promoting this obvious scheme, and since he’s arrogantly confident that his team will be the ones in the final it stands to reason he’d love their fans to be allowed in Parkhead, even before ours are. Yeah mate, but … no.
If the game is moved from Hampden to accommodate fans, then let it go to Murrayfield; that’s the logical conclusion and the one most of us would support.
Is there really any cause to move it from Hampden, except for the possibility of having supporters in the ground? Everyone understands that the occasion would be better with supporters there but first, we’ll probably not be all the way out of the lockdown by then and secondly, it’s ludicrous to suggest that we’ll be ready enough for tens of thousands of people to go to football.
Most of us would rather leave it until next season; let the lockdowns restrictions be loosened slowly, to see what the impact is. The more we get the number of cases down now, the more chance we all have of seeing fans in grounds in large numbers from the start of the next campaign. Every time the governments have rushed us towards “normal” during this, things have gone badly awry very quickly indeed. We can avoid making that mistake yet again.
Hampden is the national stadium. Finals ought to be played there. If the priority is getting fans into the ground the SFA should stop acting like spoiled idiots being denied candy when their pockets are already full of it, and go to Scottish Rugby and rent their ground.
Because the thing about Hampden is that it’s a neutral ground, and that’s still important, even in a game as lop-sided as this one, even in a season where a certain club hasn’t had a single spot kick awarded against them by a Scottish referee.
There are two basic things to think about here; can we really afford to have fans in the ground even if it means infection rates jump up a notch and do we really want the showpiece event of Scottish football played at a non-neutral venue where the big club which isn’t in it nevertheless benefits from it to the tune of a nice fat rental fee?
It’s a stupid option, and it’s not a great surprise that it was proposed by an idiot like McCoist. But he’s not entirely without intelligence, and you can see the scam if you step back from it for a second. There is no way that anybody should be seriously entertaining this.