In 2019, Tom Boyd and Celtic were vilified. Brown and his club get to play the victims.

Yesterday, I closed out the articles for the day with a piece on Ibrox’s deranged statement following the SFA’s decision to fine them £3,000 for the comments made by John Brown — comments in which he accused the official who disallowed a goal in the Hibs game of being corrupt.

He had the chance to walk it back. Instead, he doubled down. And the club’s own statement makes it clear they essentially agree with him.

While I was putting that piece together, I went back to the Tom Boyd incident from 2019, because I wanted to understand it in full context — to see what exactly he said, how it was received, and what the fallout was.

What amazed me wasn’t Boyd’s remarks, which I remembered fairly well, but the media’s reaction to them — and the stark contrast between that and the way they’ve responded to what Brown said and did.

Now, it barely needs saying — but I’ll say it anyway — if you’ve read the other piece, you’ll know Boyd’s comments don’t come anywhere near what Brown said.

Boyd made allusions. He didn’t come right out and accuse anyone.

Since we’re dealing with the actual wording of the rulebook, that isn’t splitting hairs — it matters. His comments didn’t cross the disciplinary threshold. Brown’s did. Brown was clear and unequivocal. There was no ambiguity. His comments were actionable. And again, he doubled down on them.

Let’s be blunt. We all know what Boyd was implying. Nobody’s pretending otherwise. I certainly didn’t when I wrote about it at the time.

I said that all Boyd had done was say what people in the mainstream media should have been saying — that when John Beaton was spotted in an Ibrox supporters’ pub not long after a particularly contentious match involving that club and ourselves, it raised obvious, serious questions.

Everyone in the media ecosystem knows what Beaton is.

It’s not even a badly kept secret — it’s not a secret at all. It’s an unspoken fact. And it embarrasses the game in this country when we pretend otherwise. When we pretend that there aren’t implications. When we pretend that maybe he shouldn’t be refereeing games involving them, or us.

We know what Boyd was saying, and frankly, I agree with it. But that’s not really the point of this piece, and it’s not why one of them was sanctioned and the other wasn’t.

Let me make it absolutely clear. Boyd’s comments, even if we all knew what he was getting at, did not reach the level required to breach the SFA’s disciplinary code. They’d have struggled to make the charge stick. Brown’s comments left no such ambiguity. They were blatant. He said it. He meant it. He repeated it.

Ibrox’s case isn’t that Brown didn’t break the rules. He clearly did. Their argument is the usual egocentric, arrogant guff — that they shouldn’t be punished because other clubs have supposedly gotten away with similar things.

But naturally, their statement doesn’t name a single case or offer a shred of evidence. It’s the classic ‘whataboutery’ of a guilty party with no defence.

Here’s the key point: they haven’t actually alleged bias in their statement. They haven’t actually used those words. And that’s the get-out. It’s also what Boyd did. He walked right up to the line, and stopped. If Brown had a fraction of Boyd’s intelligence, he might’ve done the same. But since Brown doesn’t have a fraction of the average rock’s intelligence, he blurted it out again.

In the aftermath of Brown’s remarks, very few media outlets thought it worth covering at all. The few that did only reacted after it became clear the SFA would be opening a disciplinary case. Compare that to Tom Boyd, who they crucified immediately. And for something he didn’t even say. Some of the language used back then was every bit as hysterical as the Ibrox club’s statement this week.

Take The Sun, which accused Boyd of a “bitter blast.” Neil Cameron at The Evening Times said Boyd had called Beaton a cheat — which he didn’t. You really had to twist his words to get that, but Cameron was more than happy to oblige.

Our old pal Tom English at the BBC accused Boyd of “casting wild aspersions about a referee” to distract from Celtic’s poor performance — even though Boyd specifically said Celtic had underperformed, and reiterated that he wasn’t making excuses. That part of the statement? Conveniently ignored.

I said yesterday I couldn’t find another case of a club’s internal communications team where a breach of Rule 28 had been alleged; I found another just after I posted the piece, and it was so weak the SFA didn’t even deem it worth of investigation and most outlets didn’t consider it worthy of highlighting.

Most outlets. Not all. There’s always one.

In 2022, Boyd made another passing comment on Celtic TV, suggesting a penalty given at one end wouldn’t have been awarded at the other. (You can guess which end it was awarded at.) It’s the kind of thing that gets said on club media channels all the time. Again, it wasn’t a direct allegation. Again, it didn’t reach any actionable standard. The SFA ignored it as did nearly everyone else.

Everyone, that is, except Mark Pirie at The Record, who threw a tantrum, and the cause was taken up by a deranged Ibrox fan media writer who went totally off the deep end — demanding Boyd be sanctioned and banging the drum so hard I suggested at the time he might need medical attention. Fast forward to this week — that same guy and his ilk are raging that Brown has been sanctioned at all.

But no one — no one — went as far off the rails in 2019 as Keith Jackson. His commentary was not just hysterical. It was off-the-scale. Especially when you consider how quiet he’s been about Brown’s comments.

I want you to see this for yourself. The following is the first half of Jackson’s article, quoted in full — I’m not touching a word. I’m not even rearranging it for flow. I want you to see how utterly unhinged it was, in its entirety:

“Scottish football’s great odditorium has only been back in business for a few short weeks. But you don’t need to be a fire safety officer to know there’s a tinderbox feel around the old place already. From pitch invasions and collapsing roofs on week one at Rugby Park to fan protests and calls for regime change at Celtic Park all before the barbeque has been packed away for the summer.

“There is a strong whiff of high octane madness hanging heavy in the air above Glasgow now that it has become apparent that a genuine, significant sporting rivalry is about to be restored to the already toxic relationship between the city’s irreconcilable neighbours. If Steven Gerrard and (Ibrox) really are fit for the purpose of mounting a prolonged and serious challenge to Celtic’s monopoly, then it should provide the adrenaline shot that our game so badly needs.

“There are few other dramas quite so eye-poppingly engrossing as a proper title fight between these old feuding rivals. And yet, for all the excitement and the plot twists still to come, there is also a feeling of dread which gnaws away in the pit of the stomach along with the sure fire knowledge that, amidst all of this dizzying intoxication, someone somewhere is about to take matters too far by forgetting how to behave like a decent, reasoned human being. Of course, it’s bound to happen. Stockpiled evidence of grotesque conduct from the past is as overwhelming as it is utterly depressing.

“It’s been this way for so long now that Scottish football ought to carry an official government health warning: Likely to drag those prone to moronic lapses to a whole new level. Side effects include increased chance of knuckle dragging.

“Which is precisely why the heart sunk just a little bit on Saturday afternoon when Tom Boyd appeared to make a rallying cry to the most combustible elements in Celtic’s support, live on the club’s own online TV channel.”

“As part of his co-commentator duties during the Betfred Cup win over Dunfermline, he took it upon himself to launch into a hugely regrettable and wholly vitriolic attack on match official John Beaton after the ref had failed to award Celtic with a fairly blatant looking penalty kick.

“That Boyd had every right to feel unhappy about the decision is not really up for debate. The newly drafted handball rules made this one a stone-waller and, therefore, a bad one for Beaton and his assistant to miss.”

That’s what Jackson wrote. That is what passed for reasoned commentary. Look at his use of language; “Tinderbox.” “High octane madness.” “Moronic lapses.” “Knuckle dragging.” “Vitriolic.” “Feeling of dread.”

And all of it aimed at a former Celtic captain — one of the most decorated players in the country over a comment that didn’t even breach the rules.

Compare that with his silence now. Compare that with his unwillingness to say anything when Brown outright called referees corrupt.

That’s not dangerous or inflammatory? Jackson’s own comments about Boyd at the time were not dangerous or inflammatory? He probably doesn’t think so. His was the newspaper, after all, which asked “Who is most hated at Ibrox? The taxman or Neil Lennon?” shortly before we went there for a game at around that same time.

The only people who’ve put Beaton in a difficult or dangerous position are those in the SFA who know what his affiliations are, and still give him these matches.

If they genuinely cared about the welfare of officials, they’d remove him from fixtures involving Celtic or Ibrox. Every other major league in Europe does this.

Scotland? Not a chance.

We are the outliers. The only league that pretends bias doesn’t exist. That treats the very idea of managing for it as unthinkable. That refuses to do the bare minimum to protect the integrity of its games.

So go back over all those terms Jackson used.

Dangerous connotations. Tinderbox. High octane madness. Feeling of dread. Knuckle dragging. Vitriolic. And you tell me: whose language was inflammatory? Whose rhetoric was dangerous? Whose commentary was more serious?

Was it Tom Boyd — who made a subtle remark on a niche broadcast — or Keith Jackson, who basically wrote the script for Apocalypse Now over a guy discussing a failed penalty kick call? The SFA aren’t the only ones applying a double standard, folks. The media has been lamentable here.