Tomorrow the great and the good of Scottish Football and Strathclyde Police meet with the First Minister to rake over the coals of the Scottish Cup tie.
Whilst unemployment surges, reported crimes rise to the million mark and knife crime reaches epidemic proportions Scotland will come to a stand-still to discuss a football match which saw 30 or so punters nicked, over 20 of them for singing. Still, it is an election year.
Now that we have come this far due to Celtic’s various deranged media campaigns and player/official behaviour why don’t we go the whole hog? With all this fuss I think we would be failing in our duty not to call for a full and independent investigation to get to the bottom of it all.
Players, agents, journalists, directors, fans - we’re all capable of speaking with a forked tongue. Some will deny reality, forget what was said, claim faulty memory - all because it is now deemed to have “gone too far.” Well: tough titty.
Now that events have taken us this far we might as well plough on - despite the changing tunes and desperate attempts in the media to stifle debate or to establish positions contrary to the evidence.
The only way to extract real evidence is to have the police conduct an investigation which covers both the tie at Ibrox and the replay at Parkhead.
These games are linked - not merely as a draw and a replay but media and club personnel have repeatedly claimed events in the Ibrox tunnel motivated behaviour at Parkhead.
Rather than hearsay from “club insiders” or “friends” of those involved being leaked through the media let’s take half an hour or so per person and get them interviewed under police caution. That’s the only way to establish the circumstances.
Players and staff may be under pressure to remain silent or to mould their utterances for a quiet life and the hope that ‘things will die down.’ I doubt many would be prepared to lie to a policeman.
So let’s get the policeman’s torch shone into a few nooks and crannies and establish the sequence of events which lead to the allegations of racism and violence at both grounds.
It’s only sensible that we do justice to an issue which is so grave the First Minister has dropped everything to call a summit.
Which club or fair-minded individual could could argue with that?