Michael Gannon
YOU can’t beat a good conspiracy.
These days it only takes half an hour on YouTube to have you convinced the royal family are shape-shifting lizards, Donald Trump is a Russian plant and aliens built the pyramids before flitting to Mars.
It only takes a couple of clicks to stumble into the Scottish football version as well.
Don Robertson’s howler in Dingwall last week. Another incident for the evidence pile that proves the SFA have an agenda against Celtic.
Do us a favour chaps. If the SFA were plotting to trip up the Parkhead men it might be the worst possible conspiracy in history.
Celtic already have the title in the trophy cabinet. It’s sitting next to the shiny League Cup.
They are 180 minutes away from having to use another shelf. If there is an unseen hand at work here to stop Celtic being successful they are pretty hopeless. The Hoops are on six in a row and counting.
As conspiracies go this one is about as much use as when old Guy Fawkes nearly blew his own coupon off under the Houses of Parliament.
If there was some SFA plot to curtail Celts they are a bit late in swinging in to action.
Of course it won’t stop some of the punters giving it the Joe Stalin routine. Just because they say we are paranoid it doesn’t mean they aren’t all out to get me.
This week we’ve had the usual stuff about dodgy refs and even dodgier handshakes and with a Rangers game around the bend it doesn’t take much to turn in to conspiracy corner.
The problem in this country though is we often confuse competence with conspiracy. That’s the thing about Sunday’s duff call in Dingwall.
It wasn’t even Celtic who were hurt the most by the shocker of a penalty decision when Alex Schalk went all Tom Daley.
The Hoops had nothing really to lose. It was Inverness, Dundee, Motherwell, Hamilton and Kilmarnock who would all have been spitting their tea out in front of the telly.
That was an ill-gained point for Ross County – not two points whipped off Celtic. It meant nada to the Parkhead club. It could mean everything to the other sides involved in the scrap at the bottom of the table.
Those are the calls that can alter lives. No joke. The cliff clubs go off when they go down is so steep it costs jobs.
There’s a reason you walk in to some stadiums at this time of year and you get met by faces that look like they’ve seen Marley’s ghost.
Celtic fans can howl foul all they want but it’s nothing compared to how Richie Foran would have felt seeing Motherwell given a goal at the weekend when the ball was barely in the same postcode as the net.
Every club in the country has a list of gaffes against their clubs. There’s west-coast bias, Peter Lawwell running the SFA, same old Alloa, always cheating, you name it. Fans see what they want to see.
Referees and the other officials are human – well in fairness some of them might be shape-shifting lizards – and they make mistakes.
Robertson on Sunday walked off the pitch looking more embarrassed than a kid who had had an accident in his breeks during school assembly.
He knew he’d made a mess of it. He admitted it to Brendan Rodgers. It’s not much of a conspiracy when you walk out with your hands up straight away. In Scotland we can’t just