Scotland's Car Crash

Apr 20 2008 Gordon Waddell

Time To Stop Condoning Shame

LIKE rubbernecking an accident on the motorway. You know you shouldn't, you just can't seem to stop yourself.

Welcome to the Old Firm game. Scotland's car crash.

Utterly fascinating, utterly beguiling - and utterly shameful. We shouldn't watch, we shouldn't encourage them - yet we can't take our eyes off it.

We talk about it like it's played in a vacuum, a giant test tube with 60,000 inside, a social experiment that somehow doesn't exist in the real world.

Where anything goes and we simply record the results for posterity with a sage nod. But I would love someone to tell me when fans slinging coins and phones at players and doctors became acceptable? When 16-man break-ins on the park became the norm? When it became no more than "handbags"?

At what point does it stop being fascinating and start becoming a disgrace? When someone gets seriously hurt? These two teams exist in a bubble.

Nowhere else in the country would such things be acceptable, yet because it happens in the environment of an Old Firm game, it's what people actually expect.

And because it's expected it's condoned.

Read Andy Walker's piece elsewhere in this section. He graced these games, knows them inside out - and says it's understandable some players lose self-control.

How many people said last week that Old Firm games had become tame? That they needed the old edge back and with so much at stake this time they'd get it? They were right. They got plenty of it.

Barry Robson clattering Christian Dailly in the first minute is a great example.

It was a free go with no apparent consequences.

Why? Because there's no way, short of Robson pulling a gun on him, that Kenny Clark is going to get a yellow card out 20 seconds into an Old Firm game.

It would be a disaster for him, setting that as the tone for the night. So he lets it go. But that's these games in a nutshell on the park. Different rules from the rest.

Off it? That's the fourth time we have seen missiles thrown on to the park in these games, three of them at Parkhead.

Hugh Dallas got his head split open when coins rained from the Celtic heavens. Fernando Ricksen's was a cigarette lighter and Stan Petrov was clattered by a carton of coke at Ibrox.

And this week the idiots excelled themselves. The Rangers doc got a coin, Nacho Novo was given a special kind of collect call when some bampot launched his phone at him and Robson was taking non-charitable donations in front of the Rangers end.

So where's the revulsion? If I walked up to a doc treating someone in the High Street and launched a pound at him, I'd get huckled. Passers-by would point me out and I'd be in the pokey. Rightly so.

So far this week? Silence. From Celtic. From the SPL.

Again, a game without consequences simply due to what it is.

Peter Lawwell was out of the blocks like Allan Wells last week to call a newspaper to heel for an inappropriate description of the Celtic fans.

Quicker still to crow on the club website when the writer responsible was given the boot because of it. How very "Man of The People" of him.

Yet after Wednesday night, when it comes to disciplining the same fans he's attempting to appeal to, he's been mute.

Where's the announcement of an investigation? Of the examination of the CCTV footage? Where's the SPL's inquiry? Apologists say it's impossible to find one guy. It's not - if the consequences are grim enough.

And that doesn't mean the SPL fining them 10 grand and warning them not to be naughty boys again.

It means looking at the area where the missiles came from and shutting it down. Drastic? Of course. And if the innocent parties with season tickets in there complain?

Someone sat next to the offenders, or behind them, right? If they've got any sense of responsibility to their club, if they want their seat back? Get on the phone and shame the guilty.

And if that doesn't do it? Dock them points. Hit them where it hurts until it stops.

That won't happen though. The SPL aren't brave enough.

You can hear the swish of the sizeable broom sweeping it under the carpet from here - especially as it's only a week until the next experiment in inhuman behaviour.