Wings Over Scotland

This game of football is not over.

Except for viewers in Scotland, where no laws apply.

Don’t get us wrong, readers. In the (minimum of) 32 seconds that were left to play, it was highly unlikely that Hearts were going to score the two goals they needed to win the league. It is improbable that the referee allowing the game to end at that moment (because thousands of Celtic fans immediately invaded the pitch) changed the destination of the Premiership title.

But improbable is not impossible. let’s note a couple of things.

(1) The eight minutes added by the fourth official is a MINIMUM. It is very common for games to go on longer than the minimum for all sorts of reasons. When Scotland beat Denmark to qualify for the World Cup, Kenny McLean’s shot from the halfway line hit the net EIGHT minutes into the six that had been indicated by the fourth official.

It’s perfectly possible, then, that Celtic vs Hearts on Saturday could have had not 32 seconds, but two and a half minutes still to go. We’ll never know when the referee was actually going to blow before he bottled it after Callum Osmand’s goal.

(2) The annals of football, as we all know, are stuffed with examples of teams scoring two goals in a couple of minutes.

Just one minute and 44 seconds, including the celebration time, elapsed between Lyndon Dykes’ equaliser for Scotland against Norway in Oslo in June 2023, and Kenny McLean’s winner. The two goals that won Manchester United the 1999 Champions League were even closer together, at just 1m 41s, again including all the celebrations.

In both cases, the ball was actually in play for only about 30 seconds of that time. 30 seconds, then, is a long time in football – the referee can’t just let goal celebrations run down the clock, he has to add time on.

And that’s why there are laws. That’s why we don’t just let the referee blow his whistle if a team is 4-0 down with 10 minutes left, even if it’d mean he could catch an earlier train home. It’s not a matter of discretion or convenience. The game has to be played to its stipulated end.

Because imagine the alternative. Imagine if the crowd could just invade the pitch when THEY thought the game was won, and we let them decide.

What if the 2,500 Danish fans at Hampden last November, say, had taken it upon themselves to storm the field in the 93rd minute with the score still at 2-2 and Denmark heading for the finals, and the referee had thought “Well, it’s Scotland, they’re not going to get another goal now and I can’t be arsed waiting for the stewards to get all these Danes off the pitch, we might as well call it a day. What are the Jocks going to do, ping one into the corner from 25 yards then launch one over Schmeichel from the halfway line for good measure, LOLZ?”

Or the other way round. What if, as the BBC’s Liam McLeod said “And still we play on” seven and a half minutes into the six minutes of added time with Scotland leading 3-2 and Denmark in possession deep in our half, the Tartan Army had decreed “To hell with all this nailbiting stress, time’s up” and swarmed unstoppably onto the turf?

Do you think, readers, that FIFA would have merely ruled it a bit of high spirits, nothing to see, and allowed our qualification to stand with a mild ticking off and a £50,000 fine? If you don’t think Denmark would have had to accept that, why should Hearts?

What if the Norwegian fans in Oslo, having conceded a late equaliser after dominating the game and having taken Erling Haaland off, had collectively gone “Better safe than sorry” and piled out of the stands and over the perimeter walls before Kenny McLean could stroke home that exquisite winner?

Just a couple of weeks ago, Rochdale scored in the 95th minute of a vital promotion decider in the National League against York City. Fans streamed onto the pitch.

There were only 60 seconds left on the clock. The referee could have just thrown up his hands and said “Well, it’s done now.” But he quite properly insisted on completing the game. It took six minutes to clear the pitch and kick off again. 75 seconds later, York equalised and won promotion.

Where do you draw the line? If it’s okay to end a game 30 seconds early because of thugs on the pitch, why not 60? Why not 90? Why not five minutes? We’ve proved above that 30 seconds is enough to turn defeat into victory. The only answer is that you can’t – you play to the end, and if circumstances prevent that then you don’t meekly reward the thugs with a league championship, you abandon the match.

That’s not an abstract hypothetical assertion. It actually happened literally a week ago.

The consequences were swift. In the Czech Republic, that meant the club responsible – who would have clinched the league if the game had ended normally – forfeited the match, and suffered other severe punishments.

But every single person reading this knows that despite the situations being identical that won’t happen in Scotland, because as this site has documented for many years now, Scotland is a country where nobody rich or powerful is ever held accountable for anything, and that goes double when the body responsible for enforcement of the laws is the Scottish Football Association and the wrongdoing party is one of the Ugly Sisters of Glasgow.

For the last 15 years the SFA (with the support of the press) has allowed a club that’s only existed since 2012 to claim it’s won the league 55 times, to the unending (and justified) fury of Celtic supporters. Yet those same fans are all over social media this weekend insisting that the laws of the game, which are the same across the globe, should not be applied when they and their club are guilty of the exact same offence as Slavia Prague.

And they’ll get their way, because in Scotland it’s whoever screams the loudest that wins. We’re a joke of a country with a joke of a football league that has now, because of blatant cheating in both cases, still only been won by two different clubs (or rather, three clubs pretending to be two) in over 40 years.

There is no coherent argument whatsoever for allowing yesterday’s result to stand. It is absolutely clear by the laws of the game what should happen. But not one person thinks for a single second that it will.

We’d be depressed and angry, folks, if only we were just a tiny bit surprised.