Fear and loathing in Scottish football
GARY KEOWN
THE game is dying in front of our eyes here. Referees can’t referee. No one inside the SFA’s collapsing disciplinary system can be trusted to get a decision right. Stewards don’t steward. Players don’t feel safe on the pitch. Clubs can’t control their fans and their CCTV can’t pick up the knucklescrapers throwing coins and bottles at people.
Paranoia and hostility are reaching suffocating levels. There is a feeling in the air that something really serious could happen before this season is out.
The whitewash that followed the violence at the end of the 2016 Scottish Cup final between Hibs and Rangers suggests nothing of real consequence will follow if it does.
And as chancing politicians hover like vultures to get their claws into football again, absolutely no one in any position of power inside the sport has the slightest inclination to put their head on the block and take hold of the situation.
That’s what makes this whole thing so serious. Scottish football is such a dysfunctional, self-serving, leaderless mess that it continues to career towards the cliff edge with the people supposedly at the vanguard hiding under the tartan blanket in the backseat.
For an example of everything wrong with the game in microcosm, look no further than the 1-1 draw between Hibs and Rangers at Easter Road on Friday night.
Let’s start with the standard of officiating from Steven McLean
and his team. Because it is not just McLean. There are four of them watching the game from various vantage points.
Darren McGregor should have been sent off within eight minutes for throwing an arm at Alfredo Morelos. Morelos should probably be given a penalty after being barged by David Gray.
And when Stephane Omeonga fouls James Tavernier to win possession in the build-up to Hibs’ equaliser, the angry reaction of Rangers manager Steven Gerrard exposes the pointlessness and futility of that much-championed ‘summit’ SFA chief executive Ian Maxwell staged at McDiarmid Park in January to address the evaporation of trust in our officials.
‘You can talk about VAR, you can talk about supporting referees and blah, blah, blah, but it is impossible to support a referee if he can’t give a foul five yards away,’ said Gerrard. And so ends Maxwell’s fragile
entente cordiale between coaches and officials, nothing more than a hollow construct to limit negative publicity anyway.
Plain bad refereeing is the core issue at the heart of so much of what has unfolded this term.
Yet, the SFA won’t accept there might be a problem within. They still won’t countenance calls, like those made in this column months ago, for an independent review into the workings of their refereeing and disciplinary departments amid fresh accusations of nepotism and cronyism among other things.
Instead, that meeting held at McDiarmid Park seemed to focus on VAR — a necessity, although irrelevant in terms of improving standards — and ‘building relationships’.
The moment the SFA felt the need to write to the International Football Association Board (IFAB) in September to ask what actually constituted a red card, we should have brought the bus to a halt.
Instead, the continued absence of any consistency in applying sanctions, retrospectively or otherwise, has led to a febrile atmosphere where fans of countless clubs are claiming victimisation and baying for blood.
We media types must take a look at ourselves, too. The risible level of discourse around the national game is such that Maxwell was praised for arranging that McDiarmid Park nonsense. Why? Because he got people in a room to talk?
It’s his job. The fact the meeting delivered nothing should have been the matter of focus.
It is the same with Hibs chief executive Leeann Dempster stepping out front on Friday. She is being lauded because she said that some punter allegedly attacking Tavernier was bad.
Look, we know it’s bad. It’s what the game is going to do about it that’s the issue.
What ideas exist to sort out this disorder? What explanations did Dempster give for a ‘modern’ CCTV system being unable to identify the moron who threw a Buckfast bottle at Scott Sinclair the week before? What is going on with the stewarding at Hibs?
Dempster said she felt obliged to appear because putting a statement on a website didn’t work. That is what all ‘leaders’ of our game think they can get away with now and, somehow, it has become accepted.
Maxwell will always suffer from the common assumption he was shoehorned into position as part of a political carve-up, which he denies. His absence from the frontline as football slides into the quicksand only heightens questions over his suitability.
Above him, president Alan McRae, who can barely get through a cup draw unscathed, and vice-president Rod Petrie, who put the riot at that 2016 final down to ‘overexuberance’, aren’t even trusted to address their own AGM any longer.
Over at the SPFL, chairman Murdoch MacLennan has not said a single word in public since being appointed in July 2017.
His chief executive, Neil Doncaster, is nothing more than a deflector shield used by club chairmen, a heat-resistant C3PO on an endless loop of parroting corporate platitudes.
No wonder MSPs such as Humza Yousaf and James Dornan, hardly political titans, are lining up to make the most of this opportunity.
They’ll get a free hit, too. Just like the PR team at Murrayfield did when commandeering the publicity as the debate over Hampden’s future played out.
Strict Liability has its problems. Consider the Law Society’s response to the consultation held by Dornan two years ago. Clubs are dead set against it, but where are football’s would-be governors as this latest conversation gathers steam?
Stronger stewarding and the policing of games are two things football could easily bring into the public forum if it really wants to stop the Scottish Government from blundering in again.
Better stewarding would cost more money. And challenging the cops takes gumption, even when revelations in that midweek review into policing at football about how videotaping innocent fans is seen as an effective ‘preventative measure’ — the kind of thing to intimidate fans into staying away completely.
So the matches continue with officials looking lost, the fear and loathing around the game bubbles like a volcano ready to erupt and the coins and the bigoted songs rain down while these governing bodies and their highly-paid panjandrums hide from view and invite politicians to play to the gallery.
It is shameful, out of control and in danger of damaging football irrevocably.