McInnes and his club chose to appeal his ban. What comes next is their fault.

Last night the Ibrox fan forums went into one of their periodic paroxysms of fury, anger and conspiracy over the news that Derek McInnes might be in a bit of bother.

His appeal against the touchline ban imposed by the SFA is now scheduled for 31 August, and depending on the fixture schedule after that, there is a very real possibility that his punishment could run into the period when Celtic visit Ibrox in the League Cup quarter-final.

It is deliciously ironic, isn’t it?

They appealed in the first place so that McInnes would be available for their early domestic games. At the time, they were presumably thinking those were the fixtures where having him in the dugout mattered most. Nobody appears to have spent much time contemplating the possibility that the early games might end disastrously.

Rather than take the punishment on the chin, sit in the stand for those matches and get the whole thing out of the way, Ibrox chose to appeal.

That allowed McInnes to remain in the dugout while the process continued. Now the appeal date has landed in a position which is decidedly less convenient than the original suspension would have been. That is the gamble they took.

The funniest part, of course, is that the early games McInnes was so keen to be present for were hardly an advertisement for the benefits of his managerial proximity.

The performances were dreadful anyway. Had he simply served the ban at the beginning of the season, there might even have been people prepared to offer his absence as an alibi for some of those lamentable displays.

Think about that for a moment. They could have got the suspension out of the way and simultaneously acquired a ready-made excuse. Instead, McInnes stood there watching the whole thing happen in person and so he can’t escape his part in it.

Genius. By appealing, the club preserved his place in the technical area in the short term but pushed the risk further down the road.

That decision might still work out for them.

The appeal could succeed. The punishment could be reduced. So, this is not yet the open-and-shut disaster some people are presenting it as. But the jeopardy exists entirely because Ibrox chose to create it. That is the point.

They had a known punishment in front of them. Three matches were to be served immediately, with a fourth suspended until the end of the season. The club decided to roll the dice because McInnes and his employers believed the punishment was excessive and wanted him available for the opening fixtures.

You are allowed to appeal. But appeals have consequences too. If you delay serving a suspension, you lose control over precisely where those games eventually land if you lose the case.

That isn’t persecution. It isn’t conspiracy. It isn’t the Unseen Fenian Hand reaching out from underneath Hampden Park and manipulating the fixture computer.

This is what continually fascinates me about that club. They make their own lives harder and then become furious with everyone else when the consequences arrive.

They appealed a punishment instead of serving it. The appeal hearing has now been scheduled. If the appeal fails, the suspension begins at a point in the season where the fixtures become considerably more important.

What exactly did they think might happen?

There is also a separate issue surrounding McInnes’ behaviour after the opening league match at Dundee United, when he went onto the pitch to confront referee Nick Walsh after a late penalty appeal was rejected. That episode attracted criticism at the time and raised further questions about his approach to match officials.

This is a manager who was already punished for inflammatory comments about officials, whose club appealed that punishment aggressively, and who then began his domestic campaign by charging onto the field to confront a referee.

If you are trying to persuade the SFA that your treatment has been excessive, that is perhaps not the optimal opening argument.

But it is certainly an interesting strategy.

The Ibrox club are the ones who decided this was a hill worth charging up. Now everyone is horrified that there might be rocks at the top.

Can you imagine the wailing and gnashing of teeth if the appeal fails and the fixture arrangement means McInnes is sitting in the stand when Celtic visit?

Good Christ. Follow Follow might spontaneously combust. There will be diagrams. There will be timelines. There will be people examining the employment histories of everyone who ever served on an SFA disciplinary panel.

Someone will discover that the second cousin of a tribunal member once bought a green jumper in 1997 and that will be Exhibit A.

At no point will the simplest explanation be considered: your club appealed the ban and therefore delayed serving it. That made them vulnerable to exactly these consequences. That explanation is apparently too boring.

There always has to be somebody else to blame.

That mentality extends far beyond this disciplinary issue. Responsibility is something which continually happens to other people over there. A bad result is the referee. Financial trouble is somebody else’s fault. A failed transfer is the player, his agent, another club or an unreasonable valuation. An SFA punishment is a vendetta.

There is always a ghost in the machine. There is always a conspiracy. There is always an Unseen Hand. Rarely is there a mirror.

I will get to another of their disciplinary disputes separately because the same mentality is visible there too. They never want merely to argue that a decision is wrong. They need the existence of the decision itself to prove that the entire apparatus is somehow against them.

That is exhausting. It also makes them weak. Because the more a club convinces itself that every adverse consequence is inflicted by outside forces, the less capable it becomes of recognising the things it can actually control.

McInnes could have controlled what he said about the Motherwell penalty.

He chose the language. The SFA charged him. A tribunal found the offence proved. The club could then have accepted the sanction. It chose to appeal instead. Those are decisions. Those decisions produce consequences.

The governing body does not need to manufacture anything here. It does not need to set a trap or manipulate the process. It simply needs to follow its own disciplinary procedures, hear the appeal and make a decision based on the case in front of it.

If it fails, the three-match suspension stands. That isn’t conspiracy.

That’s cause and effect.

And if one of those games happens to be against Celtic, I will not lose a second’s sleep over it. The Ibrox club made the bet. McInnes backed it. Now they wait for the cards to turn over and they can scream at the dealer all they want if they don’t like what comes next.

It will not change the hand they chose to play. Ain’t life hard?

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