Lets do the time warp again

The Times September 22, 2005

Imagine there's no fairness: for Neil Lennon, it's easy if you try
By Phil Gordon

LOOK UP next year’s edition and you may well see a mugshot of Neil Lennon next to “Contempt”. Or perhaps Lennon will simply be underneath “Kangaroo court”. That is what the Celtic captain has been exposed to over the past few weeks, following his controversial confrontation with Stuart Dougal, the referee, after the the Old Firm match at Ibrox on August 20.

On Tuesday, both men had their day in court — or Scottish football’s version of it. The SFA disciplinary committee at Hampden Park reviewed the incident in which Lennon was shown a straight red card as he left the pitch after the 3-1 defeat by Rangers. It handed out a three-match suspension. That has not been enough for a media lynch mob that had been talking, wildly, in terms of an 11-game ban, or perhaps a cell on Devil’s Island next to Dustin Hoffman.

For anyone who studies these things, it fitted perfectly. It was a punishment to fit the crime. “Misconduct of a significantly serious nature” was the SFA’s verdict. That is swearing at the referee, to you and me. The only problem has been that many newspapers have either never looked again at the incident on television, or simply chosen to ignore the nagging feeling that it was not as bad as it had been hyped up to be, because it got in the way of a good — or in this case, bad — story and steamy headlines.

The most alarming thing to emerge from the Lennon- Dougal affair was the nature of the coverage. If this had been in any other area of the newspapers, other than the sports pages, a lot of it would have been thrown out by the lawyers in case it got the paper into deep trouble.

Perhaps I am just being old-fashioned, or it is the product of too many days spent watching real-life court cases, but the one thing drummed into me by the law professor on the journalism course at City University was beware of contempt of court. In news, business and especially court reporting, you have to get the facts 100 per cent accurate — 98 per cent is not good enough — or else you and your newspaper could find yourself in front of a judge.

Football reporting? Oh, just use your artistic licence. The most commonly used descriptive mistake about Lennon’s confrontation was that he “manhandled” the referee and linesman. Now, according to the Oxford dictionary, “manhandle” is to “move a (heavy) object with great effort or to handle roughly by dragging or pushing”. Anyone who looked at the incident again could see that such a description did not fit what happened at Ibrox. Lennon, in football parlance, may have “lost the plot” but in strict legal terms he and Dougal came shoulder-to-shoulder and there is slight contact with the linesman, James Bee.

The offence was entirely verbal. Dougal’s match report confirms this. The red card was issued because the Celtic captain called him “a f****** disgrace” and “a f****** joke”.

It is misconduct, pure and simple. It was not as serious as the barging of linesman, Andy Davis, last season by Saulius Mikoliunas at Tynecastle. The Heart of Midlothian player did not, as has been commonly reported since Lennon’s incident, suffer an eight-game ban: he received three matches as an instant punishment for his two red cards and his five-match penalty for misconduct was brought down to three on appeal. Not by “the SFA cowards”, as some newspapers have branded the Lennon jury, but by Lord MacLean, an esteemed Law Lord.

Lennon’s three match suspension is a reflection of his disciplinary record since coming to the Premier league five years ago. Have a guess how many red cards this menace to society has to his name? One. That’s right; his Ibrox crime was his first. Set against men in his line of work, ball-winning midfield players, Lennon would not even get first use of the soap in Alcatraz: Patrick Vieira registered eight at Arsenal, Roy Keane seven at Manchester United.

Anyway, that’s the facts out of the way. Enough of that boring stuff. How come the lynch mob managed to screw it up and watch Lennon get off almost Scot-free? Beats me. They certainly tried hard enough.

In the intervening time since Lennon lost his temper that day at Ibrox and Tuesday’s hearing, this was a man who, if he read the papers — which he does not — would have noted a string of articles that bordered on the litigious. A “backstreet thug” was one gem. It moved out of the realms of reporting and comment on a match, and its aftermath, into open warfare on one man.

Neil Lennon has been demonised by the press. They don’t like him. That is fair enough if it is an individual point of view, but when it is carried into print simply to pursue a campaign, it has unedifying overtones. This opinion, by the way, will be in a minority of one, or almost.

Don’t take my word for it. Ask the former Rangers player who defended Lennon on Tuesday at the SFA. Fraser Wishart, the secretary of the Scottish Professional Footballers’ Union, was not pleading for Lennon because it is his job, he did so because he believes it is right.

Now Wishart finds himself being portrayed in the media as some sort of Uncle Tom or, worse, a Lennon-lover. Not even OJ Simpson’s lawyer had the sort of question marks placed against his name that Wishart has.

“One of the things we argued was that you had to take Neil Lennon out of the equation because he is some kind of demonised figure,” Wishart told reporters outside Hampden as he explained his defence strategy. “They (the SFA) also had to forget it was a Rangers-Celtic game and look upon it as an isolated incident.

“One of the interesting facts is that Neil Lennon has never been sent off in the Premier league and never been suspended. He has never been over the points threshold and that is a remarkable fact for someone who plays his position and the number of games he has played for Celtic. I think that record was taken into consideration and I think three games (ban) is reasonable.”

Hold on, there. We can’t have reasonable creeping into this, can we? Wishart underlined the whole unseemly thirst for blood when he added the name of Ian Wright, who was was banned for two games for pushing Willie Young, the referee, at Kilmarnock. “There have been similar cases over the last five years,” Wishart said, “but the players were not punished to the level that there seemed to be such a clamour for in the case of Neil Lennon.”

Bizarrely, Stuart Dougal turned up at Hampden Park with his own lawyer, for what was an in-house SFA disciplinary meeting. The irony of Dougal and Wishart being on opposite sides is that the players’ union man actually jumped to the defence of the referee in 2004, when the SFA fined Dougal £200 for using the same industrial language as Lennon — television viewers reported the referee for telling Christian Nerlinger of Rangers to “f*** off”. You would have thought this might be one man who would have cut Lennon some slack on a day in which his team had been well and truly beaten by Rangers.

Still, Dougal applied the letter of the law and Lennon was correctly punished for it. The newspapers that have ganged together to pursue Lennon could not claim to be following the letter of the law. They have treated Lennon with contempt in its most literal and legal sense. There is an agenda at work. Selling more newspapers might be one justification, but there appears to be darker motivation.

Newspapers may say that they merely reflect public opinion, but they also try to manipulate it. Unlike someone who has had a bad game, the newspapers’ mistakes are not usually as visibly and publicly denounced, though one former editor now has reason to rue his choice of headline, “Thugs and Thieves”, after unsubstantiated reports about a Celtic team night out in Newcastle turned out be nothing more than allegations.

Dougal and his referee colleagues were yesterday called the most vilified characters in Scottish football, but the truth, however unpalatable, is that that status is reserved for Lennon. There were no banners at Ibrox that day proclaiming Dougal to be a bigot; there was for Lennon. The referee has not been attacked in the street, or in his car; Lennon has. Death threats scrawled on the pavement outside the house? That will be Lennon again.

Helping to create such a public enemy No 1 is irresponsible when merely kept to the confines of a football ground, but when being demonised changes the way you walk down the street, it is time to think again.




TAYLOR BACKS THREE-MATCH BAN

DAVID TAYLOR, the SFA chief executive, has backed the three-match ban handed out to Neil Lennon, the Celtic captain.

Taylor is adamant the punishment fits the crime. “Zero tolerance is exactly what we practice and a three-match ban on top of an automatic one-game suspension is a clear sign that this kind of behaviour is not tolerated,” Taylor said. “That’s why we introduced a five-match guideline for physical assault of an official, but we didn’t consider this to be in that category.”

Although industrial action would be unlikely, the Scottish Senior Referees Association is looking at a protest against the three-game suspension.

But Taylor insists match officials do have the full support of the governing body. He told BBC Sport: “The SFA is 100 per cent behind referees on the park, but, after the match, it is out of their hands. It is similar to policemen and law courts, but we have very good relations with our referees and encouraged them to set up their association.”

 

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Dev "SPUNKBUCKET" Advocate

Master of the copy and paste

 

Fortunately, a lot of the old guard at the SFA are gone. Sadly, George Peat is still there.

I watched Football Years last night and it included the incident when Dunc Ferguson head-butted the Raith Rovers player and ended up in the gaol. But do you know what the most striking thing about the whole incident was?

He didn't even get as much as a yellow card from referee Kenny Clark

 

I noticed that too. Clark saw it as well no doubt but for som reason he did not do anything.

 

I just want to know what 'youse' are saying.

 

It's a conspiracy

 

Welcome to my web said the spider to the fly.

 

Oh....... that ol chestnut?

 

When a Tim says that refreee made a strange decision someone uually cries "conspiracy" or "paranoid".

That is so old it is almost mummified.

 

Tiresome isn't it.

People make mistakes, take some on the chin and move on.

 

Like Fat Sally?

 

Correct.

 

Except he does'nt want to "Move on".

 

Hey Dev....word on the street says you're like a shotgun, one cock and you blow.?

 

Muhammed Ally ?

 

He is like a ****ing Sumo nowadays. And what's with the shorts and socks? He looks ****ing ridiculouss.

 

I see the scottish media have quickly adopted the practice of only using a christian name when referring to the incumbent rangers manager , whereas every other manager gets the usual surname.......how cosy.

 

As cosy as lice.