If Steve Clarke’s son had joked about Celtic no-one would have cared, and nor should they.

Earlier tonight, Celtic released their interim accounts. I’ll go over those tomorrow morning, perhaps in a much longer piece than this.

Rest assured, I haven’t missed that, and I’ll be getting to it in due course. But for now, I want to look at something else—something that happened today. It’s less newsworthy but much easier to digest on a Monday evening.

At some point after the full-time whistle in yesterday’s game at Ibrox, the son of Scotland manager Steve Clarke posted a joke on social media. It was nothing that you, I, and a bunch of other people didn’t also do. His was a picture of a despairing Ibrox player with the caption Bye bye, Rangers on it.

Today, he’s been—well, I won’t use words like forced or coerced, but it’s along those lines. In short, he’s been made to apologise for that social media post.

I suppose the idea is that the son of the national coach probably shouldn’t be overly critical or slagging one of the country’s so-called premier football clubs.

But the question I find myself asking is: why shouldn’t he?

It’s not his fault who his father is. It’s not his choice what job his father does. What he says and does is not a reflection on his father. If that were the case, then, for example, Ally McCoist might not be on TV based on the behaviour of a couple of his kids. So I’m left wondering—what exactly did he do that was so wrong?

My problem with this is twofold.

First, it’s infantilising. It turns us all into ridiculous, overgrown children. The guy is a private citizen. He has no connection to anyone in Scottish football in terms of where he works or the role he plays. He’s his father’s son. That’s all.

And we’re holding that over his head as if it prevents him from living a normal life. And for what? A joke. A joke that countless others have made and continue to make on social media every single day of the week.

I always say that the true snowflake generation isn’t young people—it’s the extremes, both left and right. And I hate using that word because its origins are on the far right, but you won’t find bigger snowflakes than those on the far right anyway. They bang on about free speech all the time, but dare to criticise them and listen to them squeal.

The people complaining most bitterly about this? The same kind who are up to their knees in fenian blood every other day on social media, or talking about their other disgusting obsessions. So seriously, what exactly is Clarke’s son apologising for? And who is he apologising to?

I read his statement, where he mentioned that his father had nothing to do with the message. Well, I didn’t think he had!

I didn’t imagine Steve Clarke standing over him, giving him instructions on punctuation and phrasing. And since most of us realised it was Steve Clarke’s son and not Steve Clarke himself, who really cares?

That club has just been knocked out of the Scottish Cup by a lower-league team, plunging them into a serious, sustained, and very dangerous crisis. If this is the sort of thing they’re worrying about, they’re in much bigger trouble than is obvious.

To be frank, if it was Celtic who had suffered that result—if Celtic were 13 points behind in the league, floundering, skint, without even the money to sack a failing manager—I’d have more important things to worry about than a single social media post. I’d have far greater concerns than this.

The second thing that bothers me is the unmistakable stench of hypocrisy from every single person in the mainstream press who has mentioned this or who thinks it’s a news story.

Let me tell you something: it’s not a news story. Not in the slightest. Not when you consider some of the people who’ve inhabited the upper echelons of the SFA. Not when you consider some of the people commonly quoted, feted, and adored by our media.

I’m thinking of people like Kyle Lafferty, with his conviction for sectarianism. I’m thinking about Paul Gascoigne, with his long list of misdemeanours and crimes. I’m thinking about the ever-conflicted Campbell Ogilvie. A certain ex-head of referees whose only “little joke” got him sacked … but whose son is a Grade One official right now.

If it’s okay to make Daddy sweat for what his son did, why didn’t the son cop any flak for the sins of his Daddy? Because that’s unfair, isn’t it? Believe me, we have our own issues with Andrew Dallas without blaming him for that.

And I’m also thinking about some of our national coaches.

I’ll never get tired of reminding people that a former Scotland boss—while having an affair with a much younger woman—sang sectarian songs down the phone to her. Anti-Catholic songs. Which she recorded and played for a journalist. And that man, Craig Brown, kept his job as Scotland manager.

He did that personally. His son didn’t do it. He did it himself. And whether he was joking or not, as he claimed – imagine getting away with that – it was a slur against a third of this country’s population. And he didn’t quit, and nobody in the media forced him to quit. He offered a mealy-mouthed, half-hearted apology, and that was that.

People should not be allowed to forget that.

And if that was allowed to stand, then Steve Clarke’s son had no need to apologise, and nobody had any business trying to make him. Ill-judged? Ill-considered? So what? Get a sense of humour, Sevconuts. Given the state your club is in, and the laughing stock it’s becoming, I suggest you’re going to need one.

Photo by Ian MacNicol – UEFA/UEFA via Getty Images

Last night we put up our latest podcast. Recorded just after they went crashing out of the cup, we called it They’re Simply Depressed.