Craig Whyte and Rangers freak show does nothing for Celtic or Scottish football

Here we go being “obsessed”. Dust down any other social media tropes for those who dare to comment on the Craig Whyte case or the freak show that has been Rangers and their sequel, The Rangers.

Perhaps spin-off would be more appropriate as this sorry tale has gone from Breaking Brox to Better Call Donald as the focus has shifted from one improbable anti-hero to another with the common theme being that everyone close to it ends up being irredeemably tainted.

Apart from, perhaps, Donald Findlay QC. There will be no paean to Findlay here, any more than any sympathy will be extended towards the club that cheated the tax-payer, businesses, employees, fans and the game of football.

But Findlay could claim to be “untainted” in the sense that just about the only criticism that would sting Scotland’s highest-profile lawyer would be that he was a bad lawyer, which he patently is not.

Lawyers can be a peculiar breed – indeed, every profession has its attendant foibles – but they often get a bad press unnecessarily. They do an essential job that you hope never to need but pray to the great star above that you get a good one, if you do.

Something like an insurance policy; everyone hopes never to collect and resents paying but wants to make it work for them when called upon.

Findlay gives the impression of being that particularly obsessive type – the kind who feels a rush of cerebral orgasm when touching a clever legal spot. The kind who would see “lawyer” as being what defines him before family, faith, football or even Freemason.

So, to see him in Craig Whyte’s corner against his former friends and colleagues only added to the slapstick nature of the Govan Comedy.

The rest of Scottish football can laugh for a moment – and probably should. The case against Whyte smacked of bitter, visceral revenge and the defendant (himself no “innocent” in the world of underhand business) looking like a patsy to draw the focus from the real culprits in Rangers’s demise – David Murray, Campbell Ogilvie and a bunch of directors.

It’s amusing because the metaphorical blood promised by the same people who ushered Whyte into Ibrox has not been shed. He’s not going to jail, after all, for buying a football club that was already on the rocks and finally sinking it.

But any sympathy for Whyte should extend to the actual injustices visited on him (when his erstwhile backers hung him out to dry) and “respect” should be limited to an Artful Dodger who had enough craft to see Fagan and Bill Sykes hoist by their own petard.

That the Scottish Football Association should respond by mooting a legal challenge to recover a £200,000 fine for “bringing the game into disrepute” is worthy of derision at best and another reason for an organised campaign to clean the SFA of the corrupt and the incompetent – which covers just about all of the senior positions.

Having a president who lied about knowledge of EBTs while having received one himself at the club that was under investigation brought the entire game into the worst ill-repute possible.

21st-century Scotland is still so small in places that a small, one-nation clique of handshakers, blazer-wearers and pocket-liners can still hold sway in major institutions to the detriment of the game of football and the reputation of the country itself.

Do not underestimate the power of football. The modern political consultancies have been tuned into the “soft power” potential of sporting and media events to enhance a nation’s international standing for years.

It is for this reason, above all, that the political world suddenly becomes focused on gay rights when major tournaments like the Winter Olympics and World Cup are awarded to Russia. The politicians care no more for Russia’s oppressed LGBT communities than they do for them in the British Commonwealth but PR-gold sporting events? That’s a problem.

Forgive the digression but a Scottish football game that was healthy and winning friends on the international stage would be a major boost to the stature of the nation. And the tawdry, insular catastrophe that has been the Scottish game similarly has an inverse effect.

So, what now? For a few days fans of the other Scottish clubs will exchange

jokes and the endless stream of shysters and snake-oil salesmen a who have stuck their nose in the Ibrox trough over the years will bleat like lambs marked out for succulence.

Then, on Saturday, the nation will unite to support the SFA’s team against England. If they win, the game will ride a summer wave of delusion; if they lose Gordon Strachan will be sacked and that will be the Scottish football news.

It’s no good asking: when will the punters have had enough? The punters had enough years ago and came back for more, martyring themselves like the unappreciated partners of a no-good spouse, whining over cups of tea and deserving very little sympathy.

Celtic supporters of a certain vintage will recall that we have had our own camel-coat-wearers to bear and that our own major shareholder has a few sharp moves of his own.

But until the fans start to act – by boycotting the national teams and exerting co-ordinated pressure on their own clubs to reform or disband the SFA, they will be part of the problems, victims facilitating a wider malaise.

A stinking fungus has befouled Scottish football for generations. The game will not be rid of it without root-and-branch removal.

Hold your nose, not your breath.


--