As many Celtic fans have discovered over the last dozen years we weren’t paranoid enough.
The scale of honest mistakes involving the governing bodies of Scottish football is astonishing, nothing is too outlandish when it comes to promoting their favoured brand.
Miniscule fines for fielding ineligible players and the transfer of trophies to a newly formed entity are a large part of the jigsaw, all performed against the darkest of dark arts aimed at profiling the outfit from Ibrox in as bright a light as possible. In 2011 one SFA member club lost out on the opportunity to earn £24m in order to prop up another member that had decided not to pay National Insurance and Income Tax to HMRC to add to existing tax scams.
Without question efforts have been cranked up over the last 12 months with losses of £14.7m overlooked in the rush to provide a UEFA licence, on the park things have been just as blatant with the events at Ibrox typical.
Finally six days after the match Celtic issued a very reasoned and restrained statement, what’s wrong with giving John Beaton the platform to explain his decision making. Decisions that left most of the country baffled at best and many thinking suspiciously.
Within a couple of hours of Celtic’s statement the classic deflection tactic was put in place- phone threats made to Beaton, timed perfectly for the next day’s newspapers.
Any threats to a person are a serious matter and deserve to be punished in full, if they are made by phone then it is straightforward to find the source of the call. Any website that published his phone number can be tracked down and again the source identified.
It is just too suspicious that the ‘calls in cops’ line appeared shortly after Celtic’s statement on Beaton.
With Police Scotland monitoring every text message sent between football fan groups it won’t be difficult to track the source of the threats to the match referee. With that out of the way Beaton, Ian Maxwell and John Fleming can explain Saturday’s decisions to ensure that no one else is a victim or Alfredo Morelos or Beaton’s erratic decision making.
