Barry Ferguson defends Griffiths as he hits out at Uncle Albert and hypocrite pundits

Barry Ferguson has backed Leigh Griffiths in the ‘tapegate’ scandal and told the snowflake critics to calm down.

The Kelty Hearts boss watched Celtic’s 3-1 at Kilmarnock at home on television as the striker played a significant role in a vital win for Neil Lennon’s side.

For over a year Griffiths has been the subject of wild speculation with poison pouring out of some social media accounts predicting that his contract is about to be cancelled for one reason or another.

After being substituted at Kilmarnock the striker threw some tape towards a bin which increased the anger of one home supporter who was quickly joined by Kris Boyd and others desperate to pick fault with Griffiths.

Ferguson has been involved in plenty of rucks and incidents in his career, looking at the events at Kilmarnock on Wednesday night he told the Daily Record:

I won’t be rushing to call for Griffiths to be hammered for his reaction coming off the pitch at Rugby Park the other night. I couldn’t bring myself to be such a hypocrite. I saw the incident as it happened, shrugged my shoulders and said: “So what?”

You could see the old guy who looked like Uncle Albert out of Only Fools and Horses screaming abuse at Griffiths as he made his way into the Celtic dugout. And that’s one of my all-time favourite telly programmes by the way.

Now, don’t get me wrong here, I’m not condoning what Leigh did next. The bottom line is he had shut the guy up with what he had done on the pitch and that ought to have been good enough for him. But, in the heat of the moment, he reacted by doing something he shouldn’t have done. I’m not going to hammer Leigh for doing that when I’ve done it a hundred times myself.

So far there has been no retrospective action from the SFA Compliance Officer.

Kilmarnock……A place you actually get abuse for putting something in a bin!! pic.twitter.com/ZKFdJHPwZO

— gavinmccormick (@gavinmccormick1) January 23, 2020