As FIFA Is Demanding Action Over Racism, Scottish Football Nurses Its Dark Little Secret.

On Saturday, at Dumbarton, one of the home team players was subjected to a tirade of bigoted abuse from some of the vilest football fans in Europe.

You do not need me to tell you who was giving the abuse or who was taking it. The media played their own role in drumming this up all week long, from the minute Lennon Junior was confirmed to be playing.

At the same time as this is being largely ignored by a Scottish media which continues to prove that its one key characteristic is its cowardice, there is a major storm brewing over in Italy where Mike Maignan, the French keeper, walked off the field along with his team-mates during Milan’s game with Udinese at the weekend after an outpouring of bile from the stands, and in England where Sheffield Wednesday’s game was stopped for several minutes whilst the ref spoke to the manager’s after Coventry’s Kasey Palmer had been targeted for racist chants by scumbags in the stands.

In the aftermath, FIFA President Giovanni Infantino, in a social media post, demanded action, at long last, to bring this to an end. “As well as the three-step process (match stopped, match re-stopped, match abandoned), we have to implement an automatic forfeit for the team whose fans have committed racism and caused the match to be abandoned, as well as worldwide stadium bans and criminal charges for racists,” he wrote.

And it is not before time. This kind of action is years overdue.

I would love to see this in Scotland. We have our own brand of racism here, one that is so alien to outside ears UEFA didn’t even know what to charge Ibrox with when they opened their famous “sectarian singing” charge against them years ago.

Do you remember what inspired that case?

It was Martin O’Neill, sitting in front of UEFA delegates and media officials prior to a Champions League match, and accusing the Ibrox fans of racism after one of his players had been subjected to a 90-minute tirade of it at Ibrox.

And who was the player? It was, of course, Neil Lennon. On Saturday his boy was subjected to that same degenerate behaviour amidst chants that his father should hang.

What he was subjected to was absolutely disgusting, and of course the media silence, their utter failure to confront this stuff and call it out every single time something like it happens, is part of the problem. Tom English would rather talk about our “failure” to start an academy graduate in the game yesterday. They really have a lot to answer for.

So too, though, do some of the players here.

The most inspiring thing about what happened in Italy and England is the universal condemnation from the clubs and from dozens of individual players within them, all of them giving their unequivocal support to their colleagues. In Italy it’s wall to wall. In England, high profile players and former professionals have spoken out in defence of Palmer.

Who in Scottish football has raised a murmur in support for Lennon? It is shocking. Dumbarton’s footballers, like those of Milan, were well entitled to leave the field in protest at that; thankfully the Milan players showed their team-mate solidarity.

Kick It Out released a statement;

“Now it’s up to authorities and clubs to punish those responsible, but if clubs cannot prevent this happening, they too should face consequences,” it said.

“We welcome stronger and more meaningful punishments, as called for by FIFA. It cannot be on the players to solve this. They are already showing courage under extreme distress and emotional trauma. They need support with actions not words.”

The club that turned its fans on a referee at the start of this month are certainly not going to get a grip on this matter themselves. Hell, to the best of my knowledge Dumbarton FC didn’t utter a single syllable in support of their footballer, they’ve just acted like it didn’t happen at all. And maybe it didn’t, because no-one in the media seems to care.

It’s times like this when I ponder that old George Berkeley musing, “If a tree falls in the forest and no-one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?”

But this isn’t a case of no-one being there to hear it, although we’re acting that way.

Our version of that question is, “If Ibrox’s bigotry and bile is ignored, did it actually happen?” We all know that it happened. We all know that it took place. It was heard clearly both by those in the ground and those watching the game on TV. To ignore it is to ignore something scandalous, and in doing so we cannot prevent it from happening again.

Scottish football continues to keep its dark little secret even as the rest of the world is coming to grips with racism in its traditional form. Our own is peculiar, localised, but no less real or depressing. More depressing by far is that we could have driven this out of the game decades ago and chose the path of least resistence instead.

But I suppose when it’s not your blood these Peepul are up to their knees in, you’re less invested in finding an answer.

Sooner or later though, Scottish football must reckon with this and say “no more.”