Too much thinking from the SFA but not enough action
Independent tribunal felt they could not hear the case
SEND for the philosophers. Because three guys on an SFA panel may well have stumbled upon a new concept of reality. Yes, right up there with Donald Rumsfeld’s ( in) famous and immediately parodied gibberish about known unknowns and unknown unknowns, the gents who cleared Josh Meekings of a redcard offence at Hampden last week bring you … wait for it … the seen unseen. Or is it the unseen seen?
The officials definitely saw ‘The Incident’, we are told. They just didn’t see the hand-ball that should have resulted in a penalty for Celtic and a dismissal for Meekings.
But they did see what happened, oh yes, certainly. Which means the independent judicial panel tribunal felt they couldn’t possibly hear the case.
Now, you may take a guess at how t he holy trinity sitting in non- judgment reached this conclusion.
Maybe they were tied in legal knots by the Inverness Caley player’s lawyer, a not uncommon occurrence in the history of m’learned friends versus various models of the Hampden hierarchy.
Perhaps they simply wanted to clear Meekings, whose possible suspension for the Scottish Cup Final had been declared the greatest injustice in this country since a young Gillian Sturgeon woke to find a shaven-heided Barbie doll lying on her pillow.
If Parliament had still been in session, there would probably have been questions in the House.
Surely they weren’t moved to ‘do the right thing’ by Inverness manager John Hughes slipping into self-pitying, self-aggrandising nonsense about being on the brink of quitting football, at least until a host of unnamed — but hugely important, obviously — figures in the game came rallying around the great Yogi.
Thinking outside the box, maybe the tribunal trio have simply taken a few too many philosophy classes, spending long days discussing if that cow really is in yonder field, etc.
Crawl inside that maze often enough and, honestly, you’ll think anything is possible.
Hand-ball? That’s making some pretty big assumptions about the verifiable state of matter. And can we be totally sure that Meekings — if you want to get bogged down in labelling entities with names — was there at all?
We live in an era when Scottish football has appeared to disappear d o wn several wor mhol e s , popping out in a world where Hearts have run away with the Championship, leaving Hibs or Rangers — or both — behind via the play-offs.
Celtic and Dundee United, meanwhile, can play each other seven times a season. Anything is possible/probable/likely, depending on how you look at it. That kind of t hinking might explain why Meekings received a second ‘phantom’ suspension by the SFA on Saturday before his team’s game with Aberdeen, his name appearing on a list of players banned for accumulating six yellow cards, despite the fact he had only been booked three times this season.
A word of warning, though. It is not advisable for the untrained to venture down this mental path without a trained philosopher there to act as guide.
You could end up like Woody Allen’s character in Manhattan Murder Mystery, exhaustedly muttering: ‘Either he’s a twin or she’s a twin. Or you’re a twin or I’m a twin …’