Yesterday Proved That Celtic’s Pyro Problem Is Not Going To Be Solved At Hampden.

It was the French writer and philosopher Blaise Pascal who said “justice without force is impotent.”

Imagine you run a shop, and every single day a bunch of little neds comes in there and takes stuff off the shelves and torment the other customers.

You would call the cops, right? But what if the cops could only give them a warning, or arrest them only for the courts to dismiss the charges, or for the courts to send them away with their own version of the warning?

You might wonder why “protection under the law” even exists, since it’s not functioning as it was intended to.

The much heralded “pyro summit” was held yesterday, and in the aftermath of it the governing bodies published a statement which says way more than it intended to say.

Because the statement itself is flat-out fluff and nonsense without a single informative word in it. But that’s the giveaway, because if there had been concrete proposals or the possibility of concrete action that would have been made clear.

That nothing emerged but this flat statement says it all.

The statement reads as follows:

“The Scottish FA and the SPFL are committed to working with clubs to explore ways in which the matchday experience can be enhanced. However, the fact remains that the use of pyrotechnics at football matches is not only dangerous but illegal.

“The actions of a minority of supporters are having a disruptive and detrimental impact on the safety of the vast majority of supporters and potentially the players and officials on the field.

“We remain committed to working with all stakeholders, including the Scottish Government, Police Scotland, clubs and supporters’ organisations to address the matter.

“In the meantime, it has been very encouraging to see a number of our clubs take direct action in response to the use of pyrotechnics within their own stadia.”

If anyone was looking for leadership here, they aren’t going to find it in that pitiful statement.

There is nothing new on the table here, all that event achieved was to waste everyone’s afternoon with a talking shop, a round-table chit-chat where everyone got to say their piece and the SFA and the SPFL basically sent them home again with a “thanks.”

The end paragraph says it all.

This is up to the clubs, and it’s the clubs who will take the flak from their own fans. The police will try to enforce the law, and the clubs will keep issuing statements and handing out bans where appropriate and necessary and the Scottish Government will congratulate itself on at least giving the police a few more teeth to bite down with … and Scottish football’s governing bodies will carry on refusing to govern.

Our AGM is today, and football governance ought to be a major subject on the agenda. Because in Scotland it is non-existent.

This was the moment for some sort of proposal for sanctioning clubs whose fans bring pyro into grounds.

I have never supported any version of Strict Liability, but we badly need to get away from the crazy idea that this stuff should be in stadiums, used by people with only the most basic understanding of what it can do.

Too many people aren’t thinking about the wider implications of its use.

It’s dangerous for a start.

And if we’re going to let people break the law then where do we draw the line?

As long as this stuff is unsafe it’ll be criminalised. As long as it’s criminalised this discussion has nowhere to go, and the only thing left is to get it out of grounds.

The only way to do that is to move it from being popular with fans to being unpopular with them, and if the clubs are being sanctioned for their use, with the threat of partial ground closures and bans on away fans then this stuff is no longer sexy and no longer fun.

The “no pyro no party” brigade will have no option but to wise up.

When the club issues a request for people to stop doing it those requests will carry proper weight.

I know that a lot of people amongst our own support aren’t going to get the message here until we have suffered a ground closure or stand closure as part of UEFA’s crackdown; when that happens, I wonder if we’ll ever see pyro at a European game again.

The clubs need help here.

This is issue is out of control and the clubs are unable to get through to the fans because, on the surface of it, this stuff seems largely consequences free. Even the new police powers aren’t going to dissuade certain people from continuing to push their luck … maybe the threat of sanctioning clubs will.

It has to be thought through.

The second part of Pascal’s quote is that “force without justice is tyranny” and we want to avoid that as much as we can, but when clubs are asking fans not to do stuff and fans are continuing to do it that’s because the threat of meaningful penalties of the sort they can’t ignore are virtually non-existent.

Rules and regulations which aren’t enforced are utterly worthless. More worthless still are the ones nobody wants to bring into being.

Yesterday, the opportunity to do something concrete was flogged when the first meaningful gathering of all the interested parties passed off without a single serious proposal for change being made.

This stuff is in such widespread use in Scotland now that it’s a matter of time before there’s a tragedy. We can all see it coming. We all know it’s in the post.

When it happens a lot of people are going to have to look in the mirror and ask “could I have prevented this?” and for many of them the answer is going to be yes, and a lot of them work at Hampden.