Celtic Will Be In The Right Today. But That Doesn’t Mean We Will Win.

The news, yesterday, that we’re rolling out the big guns in the Brendan Rodgers disciplinary case should make this a straightforward enough day with a nice little victory at the end of it. But let’s not forget who it is we are dealing with here.

This is the SFA and with the SFA you just never know. We have brought in a top man to rep him, but Rodgers still may not win.

This is not because we’re not in the right.

Nobody can reasonably hold the position that the SFA is holding to here, that even when an official is obviously incompetent that nobody should say so. That officials in Scotland are beyond reproach.

That stance cannot be sustained by any right-minded person, and it makes the association a laughing stock that they would attempt to argue to the contrary. And yet, that’s what’s in the rulebook.

I mean, let’s deal with the elephant in the room here; a plain text reading of the regulations makes it clear that Rodgers has violated them. That’s how they were ever able to charge him in the first place. Technically speaking, it’s open and shut.

But that’s part of the problem.

A plain text reading of those regulations would have had many a manager in the dock before him and at least one other club sanctioned for going much, much further than he has gone.

That club actually demanded that a ref not get their games in the league on account of bias and not only did they get away with it, to all intents and purposes they have gotten what they wanted. I’m certain Celtic will point that out.

On top of that, when your regulations don’t afford managers any right to question decisions then those regulations are a joke, relegating professional football bosses to a lower status than schoolkids raising their hands for permission to speak. It’s patently absurd, which is why I can say confidently that we’re in the right here, and know most people would agree.

The SFA has to know that this is ridiculous. They have to know that those charges border on farcical and there must be people within its walls who are honestly embarrassed at them ever being levelled in the first place.

And there must be people there too who realise that this has opened up a monumental can of worms, to nobody at Hampden’s benefit.

Peter Grant spoke yesterday about how a verdict which put Rodgers in the stand at Ibrox will provoke fury and spark new conspiracy theories. The very act of charging him looks, to many people, like an attempt to swing the title race.

But a guilty verdict and a ban for that game would stink to high heavens for reasons other than that; it would be a disgrace taken solely on the merits of the so-called case itself.

It would be banana republic stuff, an act of petulance and spite at having this pathetic orthodoxy challenged, a circling of the wagons, an arrogant dismissal of the rights of managers to speak their minds. It would just be obviously scandalous and damaging to the game, the one the SFA is meant to protect, and worthy of the condemnation of everyone who cares about it.

For all that, I think they may well choose that option.

I think they might well just dismiss Celtic’s case out of hand and bunker up and hope to ride out the storm, and if they do that it won’t matter what their motivations are, they will have acted deplorably and without just cause and the irony will be that part of their feeble attempt at defending it will be that Rodgers has somehow brought the game into disrepute and cast doubts on their competence, even as they are doing that themselves and proving that they have none.