Game Deserves Better Than Old Firm Deadbeats

Feb 19 2009 Cosgrove

THIS is my last column for the Record but you have not escaped me yet.

For more than decade I have had the privilege of a national platform in Scotland's most popular newspaper to sound off and to spread mischief about football.

Like all fans with typewriters I have focused on my enduring passion for the game, not via the objectivity of sports journalism but through the biased eyes of a fan.

It has been a rollercoaster ride with the Scotland national team and a deep abiding passion for my local team St Johnstone, and I have tried to keep a sceptical eye on the way that football negotiates money and business on the way.

My writing has offended some, emboldened others and hopefully been an alternative voice in a society where the pressure to conform is great. It would not take Magnus Magnusson to guess my specialist subject - berating the Old Firm.

Over the years I have accused them of almost everything short of piracy. They have colluded with each other for financial gain, undermined competition by poaching players from less wealthy clubs and at their very worst soft-pedalled on sectarianism, as if bigotry was just a"brand"in the free market of life.

That last accusation may have faded in recent times but we would be naive to think it is ancient history.

To be fair to the Old Firm what I never imagined is that I would look to them for a cure for insomnia.

Sunday's clash was by some distance the worst game of football this season. It was a new nadir in the awfulness of this over-rated fixture. Fear and familiarity has combined to create a public embarrassment.

The aftermath of this dire game has led to much soul-searching but we all know nothing will happen.

It was the Old Firm who presided over the formation of the SPL when they imagined that pay-TV was the answer to their financial future.

They are still the SPL's most powerful members in what is a cod democracy. Very few changes can be agreed without their prior approval and it is the Old Firm who have repeatedly blocked the league's expansion, by leading a self-interested campaign to secure the highest revenue from TV, shared among the smallest number of clubs.

It is they who have participated in a culture of greed, which bears some alarming similarities with the arrogant banking system that has driven us to recession.

Along with the other long-term members of the SPL the Old Firm have consistently voted for the uncompetitive one-up, one-down promotion criteria, denying First Division clubs the chance of a competitive play-off system and giving more fans the chance of some end-of-season excitement.

Isn't it strange that businessmen like Sir David Murray who bleat on about free markets and the virtue of competition, are content with a cartel, which obstructs real competition. Isn't it ironic that Celtic - the 'people's club'- are now a plc obliged to talk to the city before they inform their own devoted fans If there is a numbing familiarity to the SPL it is the clubs that voted for it, with club chairmen to be blamed, not faceless and powerless administrators.

Such is the predictability that we know before a ball is kicked the likely outcome, who will qualify for Europe, and around what month of the year they are most likely to bow out of the big time in either disarray or disgrace. God spare us another European final - the last one was a national embarrassment.

For all the hyperbole that surrounds the Old Firm, Andy Murray has done more for Scotland's sporting reputation in three months than Celtic and Rangers have achieved in 20 years.

Scotland deserves better than to be constrained by two dead-beat failing brands that strangle the life out of local competition, and yet have no great relevance elsewhere.

Their players are treated like gods, their business dealings are reported as if they are of global significance, and their fans are allowed to dominate every public forum on sport, irrespective of what foaming conspiracies happen to be slavering from their mouths.

So as I lay here before you with neither a priest by my bed nor a sash by my window, please permit me one last dying thought.

If they can nationalise the banks, could we not bring an end to corrosive power too?

Taken from the Daily Record