STRICT LIABILITY IS COMING IF CLUBS DON’T SHOW STRENGTH
HIBERNIAN appear confident their all-new, state-of-the-art CCTV system will identify the idiot who hurled that vodka bottle at Rangers defender Borna Barisic while he was lying flat on the deck on Friday night. They’d better be right. Indeed, the whole of Scottish football had better hope those cameras are as effective as the Easter Road club proclaim if they want to stop the Scottish Government, always eager for a spot of grandstanding around the national sport, from riding back into town on their favourite hobbyhorse and bulldozing through laws on strict liability.
All those guilty of throwing missiles onto the field on Friday — and there was more than one — must be caught, banned and hauled in front of the courts. And if those security cameras are proved to be able to do what Hibs say they can do, technology of a similar or higher standard should be rolled out across all grounds in the top flight at least.
There is no alternative. There can be no repeat of what occurred when Celtic’s Scott Sinclair was targeted with a Buckfast bottle at the same venue earlier in the year and the culprit walked away scot-free.
Otherwise, it will become harder and harder to make the case against politicians getting involved to mop up a mess that the game itself is proving incapable of dealing with.
We’ve reached a fork in the road with this issue. That it has, again, become such a hot potato just days before an Edinburgh derby in the middle of the holiday season suggests there may be a perfect storm brewing overhead as well.
Just over a year ago, all hell broke loose at Tynecastle with then-Hibs boss Neil Lennon being struck by a coin, home goalkeeper Bobby Zlamal having a punch thrown at him by a Hibs fan and both linesmen being peppered with missiles.
Can we say with any confidence that things have changed sufficiently since then to breed confidence that the same kind of disorder won’t rear its ugly head again on Thursday? Have we moved on from that point at all?
Hibs supporters, their appetite for destruction clearly sharpened by being allowed to rampage around Hampden at their leisure in the wake of the 2016 Scottish Cup final, just can’t be trusted to behave.
A week after that Sinclair incident back in March, some clown jumped onto the touchline to confront James Tavernier and another two supporters were lifted for alleged infractions when Rangers came to visit.
The prospect of shutting a section of the East Stand at Easter Road must surely be on the table for Hibs chief executive Leeann Dempster now.
Hearts, of course, have already gone down the route of partial stadium closure as a result of coins, a smoke bomb, hot drinks and a coconut, for crying out loud, being chucked onto the pitch when Hibs went back there in April.
Has it worked? Well, it is only a matter of weeks since a smoke bomb was thrown onto the field by their supporters at Rugby Park. That it barely seemed to merit a mention anywhere simply underlines how commonplace this nonsense has become.
This game between the Edinburgh rivals on Thursday really ought to be watched through the fingers — and that is nothing to do with the fact that Hearts would currently get football stopped and Hibs are learning, ever so slowly, that filling your midfield with guys who don’t know how to defend has its drawbacks.
Any further aggro and Scottish football has its back up against the wall with nowhere to go, if it isn’t there already.
Celtic have already shut down part of their stadium voluntarily this season because of issues with pyrotechnics. Rangers have had part of Ibrox closed by UEFA because of sectarian singing.
Motherwell, to their credit, caught and banned a supporter in April after an object was thrown at Rangers captain Tavernier, but that has to become the rule rather than the exception after Alfredo Morelos was targeted there just last weekend.
If it doesn’t, the only possible conclusion is that someone else other than those in charge of Scottish football needs to come in and get a grip of things.
It isn’t hard to understand why clubs don’t want strict liability, why they don’t want to be held responsible for every zoomer that enters their stadium in a country harbouring more rockets than Cape Canaveral.
The Law Society of Scotland also responded in March 2017 to a consultation launched by MSP James Dornan over a potential strict liability bill by stating their belief that it was preferable to have responsibility for disorder placed on the shoulders of the individual responsible and dealt with through the criminal courts.
That is why it is absolutely vital that clubs start making sure they have the levels of stewarding and policing and CCTV systems required to catch these miscreants. If football can’t be trusted to serve up the bad guys in the first place, different ways of cracking the problem will have to be found.
That the SFA and SPFL are generally posted missing whenever trouble erupts doesn’t help either. Neil Doncaster, board member of one and chief executive of the other, states there is no evidence from abroad that strict liability actually works.
Yet, when you look at the efforts from Rangers and their supporters’ groups to try to stop bigoted chanting during European games in the wake of having parts of Ibrox shut down twice this season, you do wonder.
A section of the Celtic support does appear unrepentant in the face of continued fines from UEFA, but it surely cannot be long before stiffer sanctions come into play for their recidivism too.
It is crunch time for the organising bodies and their members.
Last time politicians got involved in football, it resulted in a dog’s dinner of a law — now repealed — based primarily around cracking down on sectarian sentiment.
Now that we are dealing with the more serious business — and, yes, it is more serious — of bottles, coconuts, coins, lighters and flares being thrown at people, who knows what they might come up with?
In an ideal world, the thought of an Edinburgh derby on Boxing Day would be an electrifying prospect. Right now, it has the feeling of a disaster waiting to happen.