Maxwell HAS to sacrifice Whyte to save his own skin

EVEN the dogs in the street know that Ian Maxwell has a thankless job at times.

Child-abuse inquiries. The failure of Scotland’s national team. A disciplinary system driving clubs up the wall.

The SFA chief executive spends his days sweeping up the mess left by others.

On Monday, he was at it again. At a Hampden meeting, Scotland’s top-flight clubs spent their time throwing darts at a board with a picture of the compliance officer pinned to the bullseye.

Clare Whyte applies the law in her own inimitable way and, right now, most of them think it’s an ass.

The ludicrous decision of an independent panel to rule Caley Thistle’s James Keatings out of a cup final wasn’t her call. But it didn’t help.

When even Gary Lineker is going to war on the striker’s behalf, you know it’s a howler.

The Keatings travesty feels like a straw-and-camel’s back moment. For Maxwell (below) and the SFA board, there are no easy solutions; only big, tough, necessary decisions ahead.

Blaming the clubs for voting through the current disciplinary protocols in the first place is no longer an option.

Dispensing with the current compliance officer — and finding someone the clubs can actually work with — might be.

The former Partick Thistle managing director has already shown he’s not afraid to make unpopular decisions.

The SFA’s decision to buy the national stadium meant routing the old Hampden Park Ltd management company. Around 20 members of staff were told they were out of a job weeks before Christmas.

If the compliance officer isn’t looking at that and scanning the jobs page in the Law Society

Journal, then she really should be. Right now, Daniel Stendel looks a better bet to see out the season.

The SFA prosecutor will never win any popularity contests.

There to oversee the fast-track disciplinary process, the compliance officer considers reports of misconduct, decides when to issue a Notice of Complaint and then prepares a case likely to convince an independent panel.

Most of the cases come from incidents mentioned by a referee in a match report.

The real problems crop up when the referee misses the incident altogether.

Trial by Sportscene has become a grim kangaroo court for players, managers and clubs.

No one has the first idea which cases will be taken on or why. As the Keatings fiasco shows, there’s no guarantee that a three-man judicial panel will know their backsides from their elbows anyway.

That was the case even when Vincent Lunny and Tony McGlennan did the compliance job. Now? Barely a week goes by without a club issuing a statement calling for ‘consistency’ after another bizarre decision. To upset Celtic or Rangers might be considered human. To upset both is asking for trouble. Angered by Whyte’s decision to pursue a retrospective ban for midfielder Ryan Christie after he grabbed Alfredo Morelos’ groin in the Old Firm clash on December 29, the Parkhead club released a statement saying: ‘Scottish football deserves a disciplinary process which is fair, consistent and fit for purpose.’ The anger cranked up a notch when news of a third yellow card administered to Morelos after the final whistle took 19 days to emerge in public.

That wouldn’t have happened under Lunny or McGlennan. A compliance officer really needs to grasp the politics around football, and both would have recognised the need to announce punishments for Christie and Morelos at the same time to keep paranoia to a minimum.

Fined £15,000 for failing to control their players and staff during games against Celtic and Hibs, Rangers and their managing director Stewart Robertson are now leading calls for change after highlighting ‘severe flaws’ in the system.

When Celtic and Rangers try to lay down the law, other clubs usually flick ‘V’ signs behind their backs. The compliance farce has actually achieved the impossible by uniting Scottish football behind a common cause.

Inverness Caley issued a blistering response to the news Keatings will be suspended for the Challenge Cup final.

Motherwell chief executive Alan Burrows spoke out on Twitter.

Leeann Dempster of Hibs says enough is enough.

Across the board, member clubs have now lost confidence in the judicial process and the prosecutor overseeing it.

That’s why Ian Maxwell now has a choice. He can wait until the clubs start to blame him for this shambles.

Or he can show Clare Whyte the door and find a compliance officer capable of forging a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.