Tomorrow lunchtime Aberdeen and Celtic should be playing in one of the showcase fixtures of the Scottish season, a match in which the winner could go top of the league.
Derek McInnes could be discussing a third win over Celtic this year, Ronny Deila could be looking at the prospect of taking Celtic to the top of the table for the first time.
Live football issues two years post Armageddon.
Instead both clubs have been dragged into a ‘he said, you said’ argument over Alexsandar Tonnev with the evidence and process that led to the Bulgarian’s ban kept hidden in a file held by the SFA.
Despite the player appealing against the ban he is listed alongside other football racists like Lorenzo Amoruso and Luis Suarez without a shred of evidence being put up for the public to make a decision on.
While the SFA live in a dark age where transparency and accountability are terms to be used only for mission statements it is way beyond the time that the clubs got hands on and initiated real change at Hampden.
Will Aberdeen or Celtic challenge this flawed procedure at next year’s AGM or will it be the usual tea and biscuits and back slapping all round at another year of failing football supporters?
With no evidence to the contrary Scott Brown and Ronny Deila have backed their team-mate Tonev. No one is doubting Shay Logan’s hurt or questioning his motives but there is a massive grey area that needs an explanation from the SFA.
In every match players curse their fellow professionals- usually in their native language. During any Celtic match Swedish, Nigerian, Dutch and Norwegian swear words are likely to be heard as well as Bulgarian.
After one year in Birmingham and a few months in Glasgow how strong is Tonev’s grasp of English and more importantly racist terms in English?
How was he questioned at the SFA hearing? If he required an interpreter to discuss the matter how likely is it that he came up with a racist term of abuse for Logan?
With 20 plus Sky Sports cameras and numerous microphones unable to pick up on the incident how did the SFA get to the heart of the matter?
The answer is guesswork with both Aston Villa and the Bulgarian FA questioning on what grounds they can brand their player guilty of racist abuse.
Tomorrow at Pittodrie Logan will be under the spotlight like never before with Tonev likely to be missing from the Celtic squad.
Having branded the Celtic winger racist the SFA have a duty to publish the evidence that led to that decision, their silence adds to suspicions about the competence of those involved- and turns what should be a showpiece occasion into a fixture riddled with bad feeling with footballing matters taking a back seat.
A date for Tonev’s appeal has still to be set but in a country where it takes over a week to announce which semi-final gets played on a Saturday and which one gets played on a Sunday nothing really comes as a surprise.
Both the SPFL and the League Cup are sponsorless- I wonder why.