The Wrong Target

I THOUGHT I would post in green ink today - the traditional colour of the deluded bampot.

And no, I am not having a go at those members of "the Celtic Family" who have turned on Willie Collum following that penalty on Sunday - best to ignore these serial whingers and sufferers from myopia.

Of course football at the top end long ago ceased to be a game, it is a business, and a pretty unsavoury one at times. I do feel for referees, they are the last vestage of decency and good sense in a sport which gets weirder by the year. And, as the moral guardians of an increasingly immoral game, they are becoming increasingly pilloried.

Sadly, I don't see things changing shortly. Can we not get a couple of strong Queen's Park men into positions of power within the SFA, so that once again it might be all about "The game for the game's sake", that wonderfully-inspiring club motto, dreamed up by those visionaries who so-influenced football from the first Hampden Park?

Today, it's not so much the game for the game's sake, more: Me, for my sake, in football's corridors of power.

Rant over, back on topic.

In having a go at Willie Collum for awarding a penalty for what, I've even heard decent Rangers supporters (and yes, there are such beings) admit was a pretty innocuous challenge on Kirk Broadfoot, one met by what looked like a bit of play-acting - the referee's critics are aiming at the wrong target.

Yes big Kirk went down far too easily for a man of six foot five inches and 14 stones, but instead of blaming him for going down and the referee for awarding the penalty - shouldn't our ire be directed at the last two or three generations of football's law makers, the guys who have allowed this climate of going down easily in order to get penalties flourish.

In all probability, players have gone down easily inside the box since the penalty kick was introduced. I can only go back to the late fifties in personal experience, but certainly, by 1960 Davie Wilson of Rangers was known as a serial "diver"; indeed the teenaged John Greig's party piece at Rangers' training was an impression of Wilson bursting to the edge of the box then falling spectacularly.

John McDonald, a later successor (though not half the player) to Wilson in the number 11 Rangers' shirt, was known as 'Polaris' for his proclavity for going down under challenge around the box,while a whole Panzer Division of Germans, led by gruppenfuhrer Jurgen Klinsmann showed that the Stuka wasn't the only German thing which dived steeply and made a lot of noise about it. I am also rather proud of a line I came up with in the Herald Diary, when I suggested, after his first World Diving Championship win, that the teenaged Tom Daley must be one helluva diver, to beat: Larsson of Sweden, Petrov of Bulgaria and Nakamura of Japan to the title.

So why hasn't football done something about the practice? And this is an area where Britain can lead, after all, with our bloc vote on IFAB, the International Board, the English, Northern Irish, Scottish and Welsh FAs can lead the world, they can if they work together, force change and get us back to a situation where good old-fashioned British fair play and respect for the law is a force for good.

But, where are the football statesmen, the men of vision, to do this? Certainly not in the craven ranks of the Greed is Good English or Scottish Premierships.

Get the right men in place and we can start to clean up football - but hurry, it may be too late.