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JOYCE MCMILLAN for The Scotsman 4.3.11
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THE DEBATE WILL NO DOUBT rumble on for weeks, across the newspaper sports pages, and in endless football phone-in shows. Already, though, the embarrassing scenes of violence during Wednesday night’s explosive Old Firm fixture between Rangers and Celtic at Parkhead have prodded both the Scottish Government and Strathclyde Police into unusual levels of response, couched in exceptionally strong language; and there’s a sense that some kind of crisis-point may have been reached, in the increasingly sad story of Scottish football.
For those of you who are not up to speed on the scenes that have caused so much concern, it might be worth explaining that Wednesday night’s match was a simple Scottish Cup tie, in which Rangers and Celtic were competing over nothing more glamorous than a place in the quarter-finals, playing Caledonian Thistle in Inverness. The match was characterised throughout by high levels of aggression among the players, which caused the referee to issue 13 yellow cards, and finally to give red cards to three Rangers players, the last – to the Senegalese forward El-Hadji Diouf – after the final whistle had gone, when Diouf resumed a touch-line barney with Celtic manager Neil Lennon which had begun earlier in the match.
Worse, the aggression continued beyond this incident, with Lennon and the Rangers manager-designate, Ally McCoist, filmed shoving and thumping one another near the entrance to the tunnel; these scenes were as pathetic as they were shameful, a word that has been widely used over the last 36 hours, not least by the First Minister, responding to questions in the Scottish Parliament.
In response, the Chief Constable of Strathclyde called for a summit to discuss disorder issues, highlighting the role of alcoholic drink and of sectarian behaviour in fuelling violence during and after Old Firm matches. The First Minister agreed to hold such a summit; and the Scottish Football Association chairman said that the scenes were “disgraceful”, that violence on the pitch was “replicated throughout streets, pubs, clubs and houses within Scotland,” and that “something needs to happen.”
The difficulty is, though, that a single glance at the issues highlighted by the Chief Constable is enough to make clear how complex the sources of violence in football are, and how difficult to combat. That Old Firm fans have a history of singing offensive and aggressive sectarian songs at each other is not in dispute; nor is the historic link between that footballing tribalism, and a wider dishonourable tradition of sectarian bullying and violence. As for the drink, its role in escalating conflict around football matches is as obvious as it is difficult to tackle, in a free society.
Yet when all is said and done, neither of these factors was strongly present at the source of Wednesday night’s violence, which lay in the conduct of the players on the pitch, and that of their management teams watching from the bench. I doubt whether any of the players or managers involved were drunk. And modern footballers like Diouf – a famously explosive striker, who comes from Senegal, has played in France and England, and has been at Rangers for less than two months – know nothing, and care less, about the history of Scottish sectarianism; around half of the 22 who began the match on Wednesday night were not born in Britain, never mind in the west of Scotland.
So what is going on here is not primarily a drink problem, nor a sectarian problem; but a badly controlled, chaotic expression of the aggression which forms a vital part of every high-level football match, but which is supposed to be strictly regulated by the rules of the game, by the structures designed to enforce those rules, and – most significantly – by the ethos of the clubs and tournament managers involved. On Wednesday night, all three of those failed. The players were not interested in obeying the rules. The enforcement of the rules seems only to have raised the level of aggression; and the ethos of the clubs involved was called profoundly into question by the conduct of Lennon and McCoist, two men in leadership positions who, instead of calming the situation, fell to shoving one another about like a pair of badly-behaved toddlers.
All of which suggests that in convening his summit, Alex Salmond faces a very difficult task indeed. Those present will have to consider, once again, how to control the consumption of alcohol around these fixtures. And they will have to revisit the whole question of sectarian violence and bigotry in Scotland, perhaps reviving some of the initiatives supported by the previous First Minister, Jack McConnell, which were designed to confront this strange ghost of what is now, in essence, a long-vanished religious divide.
All of this will be of limited use, though, if it is not combined with an analysis of why the structures of Scottish football have become so weak that such a breakdown in match-day discipline is possible. Of course, the tradition of sectarian ill-will between Rangers and Celtic darkens the atmosphere, and makes bad behaviour more likely. It is, though, nothing like a complete explanation of the scenes we saw on Wednesday, which hint at a Scottish footballing culture under severe stress, increasingly short of confidence in its own structures, riven by largely meaningless but still powerful tribal loyalties, unable fully to respect its own corps of referees, and often led by men who, in terms of emotional maturity, are little more than overgrown boys.
If the Scottish Government can do anything to address the profound economic and socal pressures that have created and intensified those strains, then it will have achieved something remarkable, in the annals of government and sport.
If it cannot, though, we can only fear that scenes like those of Wednesday night will be repeated; until a way is found of stabilising the future of Scottish football, restoring respect for all its institutions, and creating an environment that attracts and supports real leaders, of the kind that have in the past transformed professional football from an excuse for bad behaviour into a real force for good in the community – and that can, given a sustainable framework for the future, do so again.
ENDS ENDS
Joyce McMillan is theatre critic of 
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