Freedom of speech in short supply at Tynecastle

AS A rich source of irony, some of the guardians of football’s morals could have given lessons to Shakespeare.

Twenty-eight years to the day after Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was expelled from his native Russia, we learned that a Hearts supporter had been banned from Tynecastle - for life, no less - for interrupting a minute’s silence to mark the death of Princess Margaret with a cry of "vive la republique!"

As subversives go, any comparison between the great Russian writer and Gorgie’s unknown republican would quickly be declared a no-contest.

Indeed, in their own, distorted way, those old Soviets - deprived of the sunlight in their totalitarian cocoon - would feel they had a case.

Anyone who could expose the inhumanity of the Kremlin’s idea of communism with the chilling insight of Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago and One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovitch could be seen as a threat to the established order.

‘The use of French was perhaps meant for the ears of Stephane Adam’

It was not merely for the lightness of his prose or the construction of his sentences that Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1970.

Our man at Tynecastle does not quite measure up.

Yelling his support for a republic during a questionable gesture to mark the passing of a minor, virtually forgotten royal without so much as a gossamer connection to football hardly makes him an enemy of the state.

It is the kind of thing that might get anybody thrown out of the pictures on the grounds of ruining everybody else’s enjoyment, but, if directed at a throng from a soap box on the corner of any street in Britain, could not be construed as a crime.

In any case, at Tynecastle, the show hadn’t even started.

And this is not just a common-or-garden ejection, but a lifetime’s exile from the stadium. How, exactly, is such a sentence to be enforced?

Will turnstile attendants at Tynecastle have a picture pasted to the wall in front of them, like Immigration and Customs and Excise officers keeping the vigil at points of entry in anticipation of the arrival of an international drugs dealer, gun runner, or notorious undesirable alien?

Considering the number of offences committed by football fans in vast numbers at every match - abusive language and behaviour likely to cause a breach of the peace are considered essential to the enjoyment of the day out - this draconian action by Hearts is an embarrassment.

If the "offender" had waved a banner declaring his devotion to the republican cause, as opposed to shouting it (the use of French in his proclamation is interesting, perhaps meant for the ears of the Hearts striker, Stephane Adam), he would still be the proud holder of a season ticket.

OF COURSE, the anonymous miscreant is not the first person to have been banned from a sporting event for a bizarre reason. Jack Kelly, father of the future Princess Grace of Monaco, was barred from the Henley Regatta of 1920, basically because he was considered not to have the required social standing.

Henley’s original patron, Prince Albert, had decreed that anyone who was "by trade or employment for wages, a mechanic, artisan or labourer" should be deemed ineligible for the rowing jamboree.

This was truly rich, since Kelly was already one of the wealthiest men on the planet and a member of a family which was, in American terms, part of the aristocracy.

The bold Jack found a unique way of venting his anger over the slur by winning a gold medal at the Olympics the same year and sending his sweaty cap to King George V.

Renee Richards was prevented from entering the ladies’ singles at the 1977 US Open tennis championship for the rather picky reason that she had previously been a man, Richard Raskind.

When Miss Richards took her case to court, the judge ruled in her favour, calling the organisers "grossly unfair, discriminative and inequitable".

Here was a legal eagle who knew a thing or two about debunking hypocrisy and cant.

Taken from the Scotsman