Let Nicola don a hi-vis jacket and check that boozed-up fans have been jabbed
AFootball is worried about the potential for vaccine passport chaos
T 6.30 on a Sunday morning, the BA check-in desk for a flight to London should be straightforward. Eyes peering over face masks shouldn’t be anxious or angry. They should be bloodshot and sleepy.
En route to Vienna for Scotland’s midweek win over Austria, however, Glasgow Airport’s check-in concourse was busier than it had been for months. A long queue for the 7.50 to Heathrow had formed. And it was going nowhere fast.
At the front of the line stood a family laden down with suitcases, the father bickering with check-in staff over his missing Covid travel documents while bashing the keyboard on his phone.
He could have been downloading an app to show off his vaccine certificate. He might have been trying to arrange a late test for coronavirus.
Whatever it was, it reflected the reality of a dystopian Covid world. A place where someone, somewhere, will always forget their documents.
And the consequence of that is a bureaucratic nightmare where every queue snakes round the block and takes 90 minutes to clear.
It’s not hard to see, then, why Scottish football is worried about the potential for vaccine passport chaos next month.
People can bang on about ethics and personal freedoms all they like. St Mirren boss Jim Goodwin thinks it’s anti-democratic to force people to get double jabbed then prove it.
Scottish Greens leader Patrick Harvie, meanwhile, raised the ‘human-rights implications’ of vaccine passports as recently as April. Then, in a supreme act of shoddy political hypocrisy, waved them through as part of the new government coalition on Thursday.
Leave aside the issue of personal freedoms and the bigger worry for football is the nuts and bolts.
It’s one thing Maw, Paw and the Bairns bumping their gums over that long check-in queue for the Jet2 from Edinburgh to Marbella.
Unless there is some give and take from the Scottish Government, squeezing the QE2 into an empty Buckfast bottle might be easier than ramming 50,000 boozed-up fans into Hampden for a World Cup qualifier against Israel on October 9.
A 5pm kick-off on a Saturday should make these games feel like a return to normality.
Tartan Army types will travel down from the Highlands, Aberdeen and Fife and spend three or four hours refuelling in the pubs of Glasgow’s south side before traipsing along to Hampden.
Even before Covid-19, appeals to get along to games early to avoid long queues fell on deaf ears. So long as there’s time for one more pint, leaving the local at 4.45pm will do fine thanks.
And that’s when the problems come in. When sober dads in a check-in queue can’t find their vaccine documents at half six on a Sunday morning, it’s optimistic to think 50,000 football fans — many half-cut — will get it right at ten to five on a Saturday.
The turnstile queues for a sellout are long and irritating enough at the best of times. Throw in all that fiddling with iPhones or bickering with stewards and inhibitions, already significantly loosened by the effects of alcohol, could tumble and fall.
It’s not just Hampden. The passport scheme comes into play on Friday, October 1 and, over the following 48 hours, Hearts play Motherwell, Aberdeen host Celtic and Rangers play Hibs.
All three games are guaranteed crowds of over 10,000 and will require fans to flash vaccine passports. This despite the likelihood of the new-fangled government app going live just days earlier.
Privately, senior figures in the Scottish game fear a public-order situation. Clubs like Aberdeen, meanwhile, fret over young, unvaccinated fans handing back their season books and demanding a refund.
Vaccinations can’t stop football fans contracting coronavirus. And all a vaccine passport means is that someone who has been double jabbed and has Covid can go to a football match. Anyone who has not been double jabbed and doesn’t have Covid, meanwhile, can’t. If the goal is to prevent crowds spreading the virus, then the more logical solution is lateral-flow tests before games.
Scottish football’s Joint Response Group are so worried about the possible impact of blanket passport vetting they have asked civil servants to look at a system of spot checks on turnstiles instead.
Nicola Sturgeon claims the blanket application of passports is a ‘reasonable response to a very difficult situation’. And it’s not clear Ministers will accept football’s plea for mitigation.
If they resist, the First Minister should be encouraged to don a hi-vis jacket and pocket £8 an hour standing at the Hampden turnstiles next month dealing with the anger of queuing fans.
Let’s see how reasonable the response feels then.