Anti-Celtic Bigot Leaves Kilmarnock Poorer And Wondering Why They Ever Bothered.

Yesterday, Kilmarnock terminated the contract of Kyle Lafferty with a one paragraph statement expressing their “regret.” Regret for what? For ever having signed him in the first place?

They should be offering, instead, an apology to the rest of our game.

So after all that, after Kilmarnock allowed themselves to be dragged into the muck of a bigotry scandal, after they debased themselves by having their manager welcome the person responsible back into their dressing room with open arms, what was it all about in the end? What did they get for their disgracing, their shaming?

A handful of goals.

Sixteen games and just three of them, only one in the league, where they sit bottom of the table.

At a time when Aberdeen have sacked their manager for his decision making, is anyone at Kilmarnock asking what they got out of the Lafferty deal and why it was sanctioned?

Is anyone looking at McInnes and asking him hard questions?

And there are certainly hard questions worth asking.

His comments before the League Cup semi-final were cringeworthy, playing the victim card for Lafferty and the club when in fact the directors should have torn the player’s contract up there and then.

Instead, McInnes gave the media a sob story and the player a place in the showpiece match at Hampden, at the expense of another footballer, one of those who had tried to carry the burden in his absence.

It sends a clear message to the rest of the dressing room, and in particular if you’re a Catholic playing in that dressing room; this clown is more important to the team than you. If ever a footballing decision deserved to backfire it was that one, and I will take a certain satisfaction from how it went that day for as long as I follow football.

He set up our opener. He was hooked before half-time.

The directors should have been asking for a word in McInnes’ ear there and then.

Lucky for him he had the referee and the VAR officials to foist some of the blame on at full time or those questions might well have been directed at him, even by a media which was lapping it all up when he was talking about Lafferty and “star jumps” in the pre-match press conference. He wasn’t laughing at Hampden.

All Lafferty did was shame them and take money.

That’s his contribution to the campaign.

He made them poorer and a club that’s easy to wish relegation on.

Clubs like Kilmarnock don’t just depend on their own fans but a collective good will from the rest of the game.

I was glad to see them back up, because I thought we needed them in the league … but the McInnes version isn’t to my taste, in part because McInnes never has been.

But the Lafferty debacle sealed it for me, and I will have no sympathy for them or for their manager if they go down and show him the door. They should have done it the moment he gave that toe-curling press conference and made it clear that the bigot would be starting against us.

Talk about a bad call.

This whole saga was a bad call, and they did the right thing ending it.

It’s just a pity that they did it weeks too late and in a manner that doesn’t earn them one ounce of goodwill.