The Media Are Shamed As The SFA Hits Back As Celtic Park Drama Rumbles On And On.

The SFA has released a statement tonight which is about as robust as you’ll get. It stops just short of accusing the Ibrox club of lying about the meeting that took place yesterday, but it does not stop far short of it. It also makes it clear that they’ll be seeing Willie Collum again soon, because it has rejected utterly their demand that he not referee their games.

The whole of Scottish football has been watching the past week in incredulity. I think clubs should be lobbying like crazy for greater transparency, and I think there was an opportunity here for us to have gotten some way down the reform road … but Ibrox’s tactics have been frankly disgraceful, and as bad as their conduct has been the media’s has been worse.

There are a couple of things in the SFA statement which are important to note. The first of them is that they claim that the meeting was amicable and civilised except for Ibrox’s request that Collum not officiate at any more of their games, which the SFA flatly dismissed and refused to entertain. We’ll all be watching to see if they keep their word.

But in saying the meeting was civilised they are saying that Ibrox did one thing in private and said another the moment the doors were open and they could rant to their media buddies. Which begs the question; how much longer will the media tolerate that club taking them for, and treating them like, useful idiots?

They have been lied to here, and not for the first time. The media accepts every word out of their club as if it were Holy Writ and time and again it has made them look ridiculous. I personally consider their conduct here to be blatantly corrupt.

The more important claim is that Ibrox has breached the confidentiality of the meeting and endangered a referee. This is an incendiary claim, but it’s what the SFA is saying. They are furious about how the club released that information about Collum; they spoke to one of their “official media partners” and gave the story to them.

That’s painting a target on the guy’s back. It brings the game into disrepute. The breach of confidentiality is bad enough, but this is a blatant attempt to put untenable pressure on an official and if Celtic had done something like that the outcry would have taken the roof off. The SFA should be pursuing sanctions against their club for that, but that’s not going to happen. The governing body has had to shoot back at them but this is probably where it will end.

Because, as I keep saying, neither Ibrox nor the governing body wants this to drag on. They can’t afford it to. They all want to get back to business as usual although Ibrox had hoped to manufacture enough fury to get Collum out of his job … they knew from the start that there was nothing on those VAR recordings, as has already been pointed out.

The SFA statement suggests that they basically understand the decision not to award the penalty in the first instance and accept that the offside information was offered as “supplementary information” and not as a cover story. So, all this fury really has been about Collum and nothing else, and it’s as brutal and blunt and as simple as that.

The SFA has protected its man. The media, on the other hand, took the Ibrox club line and got the cross made up and readied for his crucifixion. Ibrox lied to them and they allowed themselves to be used as a conduit for lies.

The SFA are not the only ones who need to reform.