Can't really disagree with anything Bill Leckie has to say here:
YOU wonder what makes a 35-year-old man like Kyle Lafferty risk his career for the sake of a cheap sectarian jibe.
Then you remember.
It’s the same, ingrained impulse that, every week of every season, makes tens of thousands risk losing their season tickets and maybe even their freedom.
The same stupid, outdated, tedious intolerance that should remind Scottish football how lucky we’d have been to land a TV deal worth £150 over five years, never mind £150million.
Only difference is, the ones who run our game have finally been shamed into cracking down on individual players like Lafferty who get caught — pardon the pun — red-handed.
While they still look at their shoes and whistle when clubs are shamed again and again by exactly the same nonsense.
As pointed out by Marvin Bartley on radio the other night, it took pressure from the SFA’s recently-formed Equality and Diversity Board — of which he’s a member — to have the suspension for abusing someone over their religion, race, gender or sexuality from just TWO games to the TEN currently hanging over Lafferty.
Think about that. Our game’s governing body had to form a committee to tell it how serious racism, sexism and homophobia was.
That’s how scared they are to confront what’s right in front of their faces.
So here’s hoping they have the brainwave sometime soon to form a Clubs Who Turn A Blind Eye To Songs That Make Sky Turn Down The Sound Effects Microphones Board — you know, so someone tells them how big a problem THAT is.
Because if a player can be banned for ten games for being videoed hurling a sectarian slur at some random stranger, what about those clubs with hordes of supporters who shout the same sort of abuse at everyone in earshot, live on telly every week?
The clubs who say and do nothing when those supporters can’t observe a minute’s silence?
Who never seem to hear the IRA recruiting songs or the rage against the Pope?
Shouldn’t there be a mechanism within the SFA rulebook to deal with them?
I’m not calling for clubs to have points docked for what rogue elements in the crowd get up to.
Apart from anything else, players don’t deserve that.
But ask Kilmarnock striker Lafferty, for instance, how often he’s been abused while doing his job.
Ask any player, any ref, any linesman how often they have had to stand there and take it.
Shout that guff in any other public place and they will call the cops in a heartbeat, yet ask yourself how often the SFA have ever called on clubs to take responsibility by demanding it stops.
Then listen for the tumbleweed blowing across Hampden’s car park.
That has to be a starting point here — if clubs themselves, most prominently Celtic and Rangers, don’t start calling out fans who shame them and the game itself, then the SFA has to call out those clubs.
Allow them three warnings. Three strikes. Three instances of the same offences players don’t get away with, then punishments kick in.
Either sections of their own stadium are shut down if it happens at home, or they’re denied tickets for the next away game if it happens in someone else’s stands and they pay compensation to the club who loses out on income.
Why not? Why can’t we at long last take a stand on sectarianism in particular?
Seriously, you Blazers, I’m sitting here waiting for an answer.
Sure, you can’t expect police and stewards to pile in and arrest 500 or 5,000 punters at a match.
But the CCTV evidence is there, all the ticket holders and their seat numbers are on record, so what’s to stop the worst offenders being nicked at a later date?
While we’re on the subject of what’s to stop the SFA doing stuff — why the hell aren’t they dealing with Lafferty here and now?
He’s admitted what he did, apologised for his behaviour and accepted a club fine. Yet the hearing isn’t until October 20.
What are they waiting for? To see if he retires first and saves them the hassle?
Northern Ireland left Lafferty out of last week’s internationals, but insisted it was because of a back issue. As in, they are spineless . . .
