Rangers to Division 3 and John Terry Not Guilty

There are two big soccer stories today both of which make me fall a bit more out of love with a game that is now anything but beautiful. I start in Scotland with Rangers FC who have gone bust and have now been voted into the Scottish 3rd Division. This means three things. Firstly, Celtic will win everything for half a decade because (apart from the brief Fergie driven glory years of Aberdeen) Scotland has only got two decent teams. Secondly, tiny Scottish clubs will get a cash windfall for a few seasons when Rangers come to play them. And thirdly within a decade we will be back to the normal duopoly.

Who cares? Scottish club football has not got enough money. I know Celtic were the first British side to with the European Cup ( 1967) but for two decades Scottish League football has been a third rate affair. We used to joke about how Scottish goalkeepers were all useless. You can make the same joke about the other 10 players in any given Scottish team these days. Scottish football serves only two purposes. To allow the rest of us to feel superior as club football always boils down to narrow minded sectarian bigotry. And to give us all a good laugh as the National Side loses to the Faroe Islands reserve team and continues to perform at an abject level. And you can always get out those videos of Ally’s Army heading off to the 1978 World Cup with such high hopes if you want another laugh at the expense of Scottish Football. And so to those of us south of the Border, Rangers relegated we just do not give two hoots.

And now to Mr John Terry who was accused of calling Mr Anton Ferdinand a “black cunt” and a “fucking knobhead” during a football match last year and was thus brought up on a charge of racially motivate abuse. Mr Terry has been found not guilty.

Mr Terry is not, in my view, a very nice or appealing man. He shags other bloke’s wives and indeed anything in a skirt to the angst of his long suffering WAG, he has a penchant for financial deals which look a bit iffy, his parents are a drug dealer and a shop lifter and we could go on at some length. In short he is perhaps best described as, to use a term he would understand, a “fucking knobhead” I am afraid that Mr Ferdinand and his elder Brother Rio are not much better – the birds, the cars, etc, that failure to do a drugs test (Rio), it is all rather unappealing. That Mr Terry called as a character witness a gentleman who betrayed the lovely Cheryl Tweedy and has form for shooting apprentice footballers with an air gun just for kicks adds to the circus atmosphere. The whole bunch of them sum up so much of what is wrong about English football and the English national side. It is just depressing.

But this was a show trial with a politically motivated agenda. It is a monstrous waste of time and money and it is a scandal that it got as far as it did. The evidence against Terry was so unclear that the CPS should not have brought the trial and anyhow, is what is said in the heat of an intense sporting fixture really something that should go to court? As a London Irish player you were regularly abused on the pitch by some of the snootier sides (Rosslyn Park, notably) and that abuse was clearly racially motivated. For the avoidance of doubt should any of the pompous twits responsible for that abuse be reading, I am not a member of the IRA or a terrorist and I have no particular aptitude for picking potatoes and I reckon that I am not half as stupid as you are. But receiving such abuse just makes you think about making the next tackle that little bit more intense.

I view Mr John Terry with contempt but am delighted that he has been found not guilty. But no-one emerges from this trial with any credit at all. It is just another reason to be that little bit less interested in football when the season starts again. And I say that with sadness as a season ticket holder at the club where Terry and both Ferdinand’s started their illustrious careers.