Hypocrisy is a far cry from the sympathy Rix deserves

GRAHAM SPIERS November 10 2005

I hope I'm not the only one who is uneasy about the growing witchhunt over Graham Rix's arrival at Hearts. Talk about unstinting castigation before the guy has even had a chance?

The hysteria around Rix over the past 48 hours has been absurd. I was going to say I have been amazed – though I shouldn't have been – at the Scottish football community's ability to be so judgemental and Pharisaic. You'd think Rix was a paedophile from the way he has been treated.

Let's get this straight. What Rix did in the under-age sex case in 1999 was wrong. He committed his crime and he paid for it. Indeed, not only did Rix pay for his offence in the penal sense, but his name became forever tarred, as we have already witnessed over these past two days.

As usual, no-one is interested in the finer details of Rix's crime. In actual fact, that case in 1999 was a complex one, with the 15-year-old girl in question, who was already in a relationship with Rix, coming as perilously close as you can get to being a consenting adult. Nonetheless, Rix's behaviour was to be deplored.

I still maintain, though, that the new Hearts coach deserves sympathy. He is neither a paedophile nor a pervert, yet the lynch-mobs are already marching on various phone-ins and websites . . . the latter, as ever, being invaded by semi-literates. Our football community really is a hive of hypocrisy.

The statement from Martin Laidlaw, of the Hearts Supporters Trust, genuinely took my breath away. Sounding like a stooge from the McCarthyite era, Laidlaw, in criticising Rix's appointment, cited "what happened to him away from the game", as if football supporters are tortured by their moral codes as they pass through the turnstiles.

This really is alarming. I could cite, as most football journalists can, leading football figures who are philanderers, have beaten their wives, gone with hookers, bred illegitimate children and generally flouted every moral precept in the book. I just never appreciated before that fans would have managers and coaches barred on such counts.

In that case, we'd all better keep mum about two of the greatest figures in Scottish football history.

The next stage in this witchhunt is going to be the effortless, two-faced goading of Rix by opposition supporters whenever Hearts play. The Old Firm supporters, I predict, with their comedy-turn of abusive bigots one minute and offended puritans the next, will come out streets ahead in the hypocrisy stakes. And the supporters of Hibs and Aberdeen will not be far behind.

Graham Rix is actually quite a good bloke and, as it happens, an excellent football coach. He made the sort of mistake seven years ago which many men in football, including me, could feel vulnerable about making if we weren't careful.

Rix deserves the chance to be rehabilitated as a coach and I hope he stands up to the inevitable taunts and bullying and leads Hearts to success.

Time to tackle the wider issue

I noted that the visiting Aberdeen fans at Ibrox on Saturday were back to their old moronic ways of chanting "Nice one, Simmy!", their "celebration" of the tragic incident involving Neil Simpson and Ian Durrant all of 16 years ago.

If only these Dons supporters were aware of the worst part of this ritual, which is the pain and embarrassment their Ibrox chant causes Simpson himself after all this time.

Simpson, almost as much as Durrant, became a victim of that wild league match at Pittodrie. Mercifully, after a monumental struggle, Durrant was restored to health, and even restored to the Scotland team, a fact which everyone rightly celebrated.

In the meantime, Simpson, especially when his own club's supporters start recalling the incident in song, has been left intermittently haunted by his tackle that afternoon. Yet you would think that the Aberdeen fans, of all people, would have wanted to help him forget about it.

A couple of years ago I was struck by how evidently decent, respected and community-minded Neil Simpson was when I met him at a football forum in Aberdeen.

His contribution to grassroots football development has been immense.

If only his own so-called supporters would let him bask in that fact.

Yes Jill, I did have nookie in mind

I feel I need to clarify a Sports Diary item I wrote last week about the mystical reasons for Colin Montgomerie's sudden resurgence in world golf.

I wrote about how Monty's sudden return to form had coincided exactly with his taking up with the very sultry Jo Baldwin, a curvaceous mother-of-two (pictured above), whom the recently divorced Monty had met on the school run and was finding to be . . . "a stimulus" was how I think I put it.

"Did you mean that his game has returned because he is getting his nookie?" an inquiring Jill Davidson asks bluntly from Perth.

Why, yes . . . I suppose that's exactly what I meant.


Taken from the Herald