Neil Doncaster may not have slept as well as you or I last night. Since the SPFL vote on ending the football season was first proposed Scottish football has descended into near civil war. The culmination of a multitude of claim, counter claim and threats of legal action has resulted in today’s Emergency General Meeting.
Much like the initial vote and the collapsed reconstruction talks, this meeting will be carried out not so much face to face but virtually instead. You have to wonder if some of the in-fighting would be so much in the public domain had these encounters been more face to face.
In the modern world of Whats App groups and social media, many in Scottish football have complained about keyboard and keypad warriors voicing their apparently worthless opinions. What we have seen in the last few weeks is Scottish football’s club hierarchy embrace what they have often maligned and what an infuriating show of bloodletting it has become. Celtic’s dignified silence on this matter is very much at odds with most of Scottish football. To be honest we tend to stay quiet on most things yet this time it’s certainly been the right call.
While Scottish football scraps over the proceeds of this season, mismanaged votes and allegations of bullying and coercion, a forest fire burns around them and everyone is too busy with their own interests and self-serving political positions to join a co-ordinated and concerted effort to tackle the blaze together. All are far too worried about their own homesteads rather than protect the village of Scottish football from a very evident threat.
As the flames lap at the entrance to the town the elders will today head for the virtual village hall to decide if we should invite members from outside the community to come in and ascertain if the process has been in some way unlawful and if we should consider suspending the decision makers.
While countries around Europe prepare, Scotland squabbles. And in Scotland it is all our own making. Covid 19 has been the accelerant, if it wasn’t this particular threat it would have been something else eventually.
It can of course be argued that Doncaster and the SPFL board should have little sympathy afforded to them given the almighty shambles they have presided over in the last few weeks. Most clubs from all divisions have agreed on one thing only, that they simply cannot agree. This day has been coming. Neil Doncaster made it so.
In the summer of 1816 Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin — not yet Mary Shelley — was at Lake Geneva, Switzerland, with her lover, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. The rainy summer had forced them to pass the time indoors. Once at the villa that Lord Byron was renting on the lakeshore, the party entertained one another by reading from an anthology of German ghost stories, Fantasmagoriana. Byron challenged them to each write a horrific fiction.
“Have you thought of a story?” Shelley recalled that she was asked each morning — “and each morning I was forced to reply with a mortifying negative.”
Then she suffered what would become one of the most famous nightmares in history:
“I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half-vital motion.”
The narrative grew in her imagination, and she followed it.
This tale of creation gone was superseded by everything from Pinocchio to the Gingerbread Man, but all comes from the monster conjured by Victor Frankenstein.
In 2012 Neil Doncaster ably assisted by Stewart Regan at the SFA and a complicit press created their own Frankenstein’s monster from the basket of assets left behind by Rangers self-implosion.
Doncaster gave validation to the continuation myth and allowed the club and their supporters to believe they were still the original club. That creation was always going to turn on the governing bodies at some stage, and unchecked that is what is happening now. The monster is terrorising the village.
Celtic supporters predicted this and tried to highlight it, yet were ignored as cranks and trouble makers.
Rangers are hiding behind a cloak right now. They are pandering to their masses, those who wish to deny Celtic 9-in-a-row, while seeing the opportunity to create the smoke and mirrors that deflects from the financial basket case their club is.
They have no way out, yet sense an opportunity to deflect from their own financial mismanagement. So hiding behind a coronavirus administration rather than a self-inflicted financial meltdown is an opportunity grasped. The scorched earth of Scottish football is acceptable collateral damage to them.
Scottish football as we all know has no time for this. What will an independent inquiry achieve that cannot be waited on for now? The vote was carried the outcome will occur. Should an inquiry result then relegations will be rubber stamped by the time any conclusions are reached. If not there will likely only be Celtic left standing in any case.
Only financial recompense will result from this, yet really that is all that matters in any case. Not sporting integrity or which division their club will play in next season. It’s all about money. As such perhaps the mooted solidarity payments or parachute payments could have been considered to fend off the support the monster has. It’s too late for that now. Egos are in play and there will now need to be a winner and a loser. The SPFL have lost all control of this and much of that is down to their cack-handed approach to the original vote.
Yet only yesterday there was a story of plans and costings to show closed door games next season on streaming platforms and allow supporters to watch their team from their home and supply a much needed source of income to floundering clubs. Is the cost effectiveness or practicality of this being debated on Sport news programmes or online?
No, airwaves and column inches are understandably filled with the ongoing multitude of civil war engagements. As such we can only hope this EGM see ‘the’ Rangers lose their battle that Scottish football’s 2019-20 season can be concluded and the clubs can get back to planning for the survival of Scottish football and some form of regular income when the new season starts with no fans in attendance.
Yet we are so far gone now that even an SPFL victory today will undoubtedly see further division by way of legal action from Ann Budge at Hearts possibly supported by Partick Thistle and Stranraer, especially now the safety net of reconstruction has been whisked from under them. This isn’t so much Frankenstein as the Never Ending Story.
There now seems no way out of this any time soon. Civil war is likely to continue even with the defeat of ‘the’ Rangers motion today. If it does and the SPFL need to throw a sacrificial lamb to the baying member clubs chairmen, then they should look no further than Victor Frankenstein.
Neil Doncaster and friends created this monster and now he and the rest of Scottish football is having to deal with Ibrox delusions of continued relevance.
Voting this motion down today will help. Scottish football then must find a way to revisit the league reconstruction or financially compensate clubs who have been punished by relegation. If not, any hope of stopping this from proceeding from SPFL governance to the courtrooms will be lost. To do that and isolate ‘the’ Rangers as one lone voice would be the best outcome for Scottish football and allow everyone to focus on planning ahead.
If and when we do emerge from all of this it shouldn’t be forgotten that it isn’t only the Ibrox club that is responsible for the whole sorry mess. The man who created that monster in 2012 is in a position that is clearly untenable.
Niall J
ALSO ON THE CELTIC STAR…
Exposed – ‘Staunch’ Scot Gardiner’s Null and Void Plot, and remember Easter Sunday on The Celtic Star
INVINCIBLE BY MATT CORR IS PUBLISHED ON FRIDAY
In other news, Matt Corr’s debut Celtic book, Invincible is published on Friday by The Celtic Star – that could be a very special day, when we get to celebrate 9IAR.
You can order your copy of Invincible from The Celtic Star bookstore and also catch up with the first part of Matt’s interview with Erik Sviatchenko below. The second part of the interview will be published this evening.
Did an interview with Matt Corr, feel free to have a read 🍀👍🏻 https://t.co/axUCjLjMR3
— Erik Sviatchenko (@eriksviat) May 11, 2020
