Our game’s gone to war with its own worst enemy - itself

COMPROMISE is the best and cheapest lawyer.

It was Robert Louis Stevenson who uttered those wise words but the nation’s greatest writer never had to pen a book on Scottish football.

Admittedly, in the Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde he may have touched upon the contrasting fortunes when it comes to doling out justice from Hampden’s sixth floor for linguistic indiscipline.

The Scottish game has gone to war again with its greatest enemy – itself.

Post-match quotes are often so incendiary Kate Adie is considering throwing on a flak jacket and making a comeback from the frontline trenches of Fir Park.

Refs are frequently in the firing line and it’s hard not to sympathise with battle-hardened bosses as their teams lurch around that wafer-thin strip of no man’s land between success and failure.

On the one hand Willie Collum is too quick to reach for his cards – Gary Dicker and Daniel Candeias, among others, stand testimony to that.

On the other, Bobby Madden is so reluctant to put his hand in his pocket you’ve got to feel for his colleagues at the bar when the big man’s round is due on a whistlers’ night out.

Inconsistency is rife but managers also have a cheek for addressing the refs in public in a way they never would their own players after a poor or indifferent result.

Already this season refs and their performances have been labelled everything from “abysmal” to “embarrassing” by the likes of Craig Levein, Neil Lennon and Steven Gerrard, while Steve Clarke claimed an official “won the game” for Hearts this season.

Brendan Rodgers said “there wasn’t one good performance among them,” as he reflected on the display of Andrew Dallas and his assistants in Paisley in September.

Had the game been played this month and Celtic’s strikers were charged with finding the north star instead of the net, on that earlier performance they would have ended up closer to Bellshill than Bethlehem.

But the lack of consistency from bosses and refs is a charge that can also be laid at the door of the compliance officer, even before Clare Whyte took up her position.

She failed to charge Lennon for his “abysmal” and “12th man” comments after the 4-2 defeat at Celtic and the ever-canny Levein repeated them almost word for word after his side’s 2-1 loss to Rangers.

He was almost daring Whyte to take him to task and so far she has refused to return his fire, knowing Levein’s defence of Lennon v Don Robertson is solid.

But Clarke was hauled over the coals for his withering assessment of Collum’s performance and the SFA’s handling of it for the game against the Jambos in August.

Rangers haven’t so much had the book thrown at them as the whole library for their no holds barred assessment of Collum’s performance in Paisley last month.

On the face of it Whyte appears to be showing leniency to managers who make comments in the heat of the moment, immediately after games, when criticism from Killie and Rangers came in the shape of written statements days later.

The compliance officer is something of a hostage to fortune to a policy established by her predecessors.

Kidnapped, you could say, although not as Louis Stevenson knew it. Maybe it isn’t compromise that’s needed after all as much as clarity and commonsense.

Managers have a cheek addressing the refs in public in a way they never would their players OUR TOP WRITERS GIVE THEIR FEARLESS VERDICTS EVERY DAY IN RECORD SPORT