Football is going back to the future –andnotin a good way

Sectarian abuse has blighted a season that began with much positivity about the Scottish game, writes Aidan Smith

If you’d been out of the country for a while – say, the best part of 40 years – and on your return took the same route as me to Saturday’s football match, then you might have thought you’d never been away.

There in a pub doorway was a classic image of those mad old, bad old 1970s: two small boys kicking a tin can while they waited for their dads to finish bevvying.

Such relaxed parenting can get you all nostalgic. Gordon Strachan once told me that in his youth this was how the match-day experience often began for him – and, given that the walk-up was to Hibernian’s stadium, possibly in the very same doorway. It didn’t seem to do Strachan much harm, as he went on to play for and later manage the Scotland national team.

Would there be any more 1970s throwbacks? Surely we weren’t about to be treated to an announcement over the ground’s publicaddress system informing a fan he’d just become a father – to triplets. That would be taking relaxed parenting a bit too far.

And look at the stadium: it’s got a roof! And seats! No more were fans being made to stand on crumbling terraces while the rain battered down – when you definitely hoped it was rain which was drenching your trousers and shoes.

Then, in the second half of the Hibs-celtic Scottish Cup tie, someone in the crowd threw a bottle, almost hitting one of the players. This was 1970s behaviour all right.

The behaviour has been worsening – the Kilmarnock manager Steve Clarke was the subject of sectarian abuse from Rangers fans who dubbed him a “Fenian bastard”. Then last week came coins at the Hearts-celtic match and the Glasgow club’s supporters belted out IRA songs. On Saturday, an empty Buckfast bottle whizzed past Celtic’s Scott Sinclair, who previously has suffered racist abuse. His manager, Neil Lennon, was felled by a coin earlier this season when in charge of Hibs. Then on Sunday at the Aberdeen-rangers match there was little appreciation for the seats provided for fans in this so-called more enlightened age when they too were turned into missiles.

Every week brings something else to make the heart sink. What’s going to be flying through the air next? How grim does this 1970s retrospective have to get?

Football had better watch out. There’s a horrible sense our national sport is stumbling towards a disaster and that someone – player, manager, referee, supporter – is going to get seriously hurt. Then the authorities will react by flinging something football’s way: they’ll throw the book at it.

The Scottish Government is onto football, about sectarianism in particular, with Deputy First Minister John Swinney insisting that clubs should be leading the fight against it but aren’t. Regarding sanctions, Humza Yousaf, the Justice Secretary, warns that “nothing is off the table”. Clubs could have whole stands shut down, be forced to play games behind closed doors or have points deducted.

Always when football gets itself into trouble like this you wonder how much politicians know or care about the sport. Maggie Thatcher, for instance, was no friend of football; she couldn’t stand it. More recently in Scotland, politicians have foisted unworkable laws onto football and criminalised decent supporters. Nevertheless, sectarianism has to be rooted out.

Irvine Welsh, who does know about football, terrace culture and