After wrong call on Goodwillie, it’s time Raith replaced Sim
FArrogant and tone deaf, this was a PR mess wholly of their own making
ALKIRK claimed second prize in the bunfight for David Goodwillie. And it must be the first time football directors have heaved a sigh of relief after failing to land their top target on deadline day.
Signing the former Scotland striker has been a licence for chaos since the day he was ordered to pay damages to rape victim Denise Clair after a civil case in 2017.
League One Clyde handed him a footballing lifeline and the move was condemned by Rape Crisis Scotland. Local MSP John Mason announced a personal boycott of home games until the end of the season.
The indignation of football supporters can be fickle. When Goodwillie started banging in the goals, the moral crusaders crept back in through a side door weeks later. He went from social pariah to club captain inside five years and nobody seemed to care.
The trouble with goalscorers accused of sexual violence is that they never stay under the radar for long. Goodwillie struck 17 goals in 25 games and could have settled for a quiet life at Clyde. In a sport where money trumps common sense every time, the temptation to recoup some of the lost earnings got the better of him. Far from his first bad decision, it wouldn’t be his last.
A move to Falkirk wouldn’t have passed without comment. Politicians would have welcomed Scotland Tonight into their front rooms. People who failed to clock that a sex offender was playing for Clyde for five years would have taken to social media with their digital pitchforks.
And, when the dust settled, the Bairns would probably have weathered the storm.
With Val McDermid as their shirt sponsor, Raith Rovers never stood a prayer of doing the same. The crime writer’s baddies always come to a sticky end.
And there was never a hope in hell that an avowed feminist would let a man found by a civil court on the balance of probabilities to have raped a woman creep into her beloved Stark’s Park in the dead of night.
Raith were well warned. When the idea of signing Goodwillie from Clyde was first mooted, the club’s high-profile sponsor made her feelings known. She even sought assurances from a senior club official that he wouldn’t be within a 50-mile radius of Kirkcaldy come deadline day.
In a costly and inexplicable act of corporate self-harm, Raith Rovers went ahead and signed him anyway. Blinded by arrogance, tone deaf to the consequence of their actions, they blundered into a public relations catastrophe entirely of their own making.
No one can tell Val McDermid how to spend her money. Just as no one could prevent the writer taking telling her 88,000 Twitter followers — or the listeners to Woman’s Hour on Radio 4 — that the move ‘shattered any claim to be a community or family club’. Disastrously for Raith Rovers, the community agreed.
Directors Bill Clark and Andy Mill quit the board in protest, key sponsors ran a mile, the women’s team severed their ties with the club, employees walked out and the term ‘Rape Rovers’ began trending on Twitter.
If the Fife club paid for professional advice before releasing an abomination of a statement on Monday night, you have to hope they kept the receipt.
People always knew they’d signed Goodwillie for narrowminded ‘football reasons’. That’s why McDermid pulled her money in the first place.
When First Minister Nicola Sturgeon and former Prime Minister Gordon Brown start shaking a fist in the direction of a football club, there isn’t a crisis manager alive who can help them. The ball’s burst.
The only way out of a hole was a grovelling apology and a compromise agreement over Goodwillie’s two-and-a-half year deal.
Paying a player to go away is the price Raith must pay to keep sponsors in the tent. It’s the price they must pay to stem the damage to their reputation caused by short-sighted stupidity. A six-figure hit is the price they will pay to save the club from an irreversible — and fully deserved — financial tailspin.
Major shareholder John Sim is Global CEO of an accountancy firm and operates from an office in Bangkok. Generally speaking, public relations disasters at Raith Rovers don’t make much impact on the banks of the Chao Phraya.
Back in Scotland, however, the reputation of his football club lies in tatters. And if the mobile reception between Thailand and Kirkcaldy is so bad that the chairman can’t hear his own fans screaming down the line, then the time really has come for Raith Rovers to replace the Sim.