Celtic’s Awful Strip Clash Yesterday Is Another Sign Of The League’s Basic Incompetence.

As the teams were standing on either side of the centre circle yesterday, I saw immediately what one of the problems of watching the game was going to be. That strip clash was abysmal.

At first some of the folk I was watching it with doubted it would be an issue … I have the advantage of being both a FIFA player and a Football Manager super-fan. I’ve seen how such similar looking strips are hard to tell apart in the heat of a match, but that’s knowledge acquired through experience.

I can understand how it might not be readily apparent.

To a layperson anyway.

But my God, how did the officials not see that?

They aren’t laypersons, they are supposed to be professionals.

The TV people must – they absolutely must – have highlighted the issue, from years of their own experience.

So how in God’s name did that fiasco happen?

How could the officials have allowed that to go ahead yesterday with both sides lined up almost the same?

The strip manufacturer who gave us a shirt which is, on the colour side, similar to our first shirt is equally stupid because our second strip – the black – would have been ever less suited to that game.

St Mirren, as the home team, were entitled to wear their home strip … but surely there’s a time when common sense over-rules that type of parochial thinking?

I’ve got to think they would have worn the away strip had the officials asked them to … and they should have.

That was just so stupid and short-sighted yesterday.

It speaks to the chronic unprofessionalism of the league that they didn’t spot that a mile away and rectify it. Sky must have been pulling their hair out, knowing that a lot of neutrals would have switched that off, unable to properly distinguish the two sides.

It speaks volumes about the game here, in a way that clapping against the monarchy never will. We obsess over such petty stuff and whilst moaning about a strip clash seems petty it’s actually a sign of a much larger malaise.

If a national football body can’t get this stuff right, you have to wonder what it does do.