Dick Campbell’s Japanese Slur And The Media’s Reaction To It Sums Up Scottish Football.

Dick Campbell was being interviewed on Radio Scotland tonight and he said that he has the kind of players he would want “in the trenches fighting the Japanese.”

Yeah, he actually did that.

In the week when this country, this city, this football club welcomes three players from that country to join the one we already have here.

The presenters laughed. Nervously. But they laughed. The showrunner apologised.

He said that Campbell is from a “different era.”

As a friend of mine said, “Yeah, 1690.”

There will be no media firestorm. There will no controversy.

Casual racism and bigotry is still a joke in this country. Too few people really give a damn.

Scottish football tolerates too much of this stuff.

It’s why Malky Mackay was forgiven and handed a job at the SFA and now runs a club.

It’s why extremists proliferate at clubs as the media makes a joke out of their naked bigotry. Some of our more ancient hacks have been sniggering along at their “off-colour” humour and ignorant remarks for years.

BBC Radio Scotland was never part of the solution.

They have, for years, been part of the problem. They legitimise halfwits.

If anyone pushed this, you watch how they and others in the game would rally round; “Oh Dick doesn’t have a bigoted bone in his body” would be the cry. Oh except for getting caught with the Rangers fans in 2009 belting out their anthems?

He was defended over that with the same argument.

In much the same way as the media and the governing bodies rallied round the flag when Craig Brown was recorded singing his anti-Irish, anti-Catholic dirge down the phone to his girlfriend whilst national coach … and kept his job.

You wonder how much has really changed.

Not that much.

Because this game is still too full of people like Campbell who think it’s a joke and a jolly to wallow in dinosaur attitudes and hold repellent views. This is the norm.

Here they don’t get sine die. They get radio interviews and manager of the year citations.

They get gigs at the SFA.

Because of how many mates they have. Because their pals are everywhere.

And what a cesspit we’ve ended up with.