JABBA THE AGNIVORE

THERE ARE LIES, DAMN LIES...AND THEN THERE'S NIMMO SMITH...

Like a lot of male teachers, I got roped into running football training at a school in Glasgow where I was doing supply. I wasn't too keen at first but, after a while, I got into the swing of things. Our school was involved in a league with about another eleven schools in the North-East of Glasgow. The thing that struck me was not just how seriously some of the folk running the teams took it, but how some of them would do anything to win!

Every Wednesday afternoon we would play either at home or away and usually had great fun. A team from a school in Parkhead came to visit us and we beat them 6-0. The boys in the losing team couldn't have cared less! A woman teacher had been saddled with the job of trainer and admitted that she had no idea what she was doing! The lads in the team had no idea of formation or tactics but they were just enjoying a day out. We gave them a couple of cartons of our orange juice at half-time and you would have thought we had given them the Earth! As one of the boys said to me, 'Ah don't care if wae get beat, sur. It's an' eftirnin' playin' at fitba' insteedy daein' work an' wae goat a free drink-a orange juice!' I encouraged the same spirit in my own team and so did most of the other schools. Two schools, however, could not have been any different!

One team was run by a wee teacher that obviously saw himself as the next Alex Ferguson. He encouraged his boys to moan about everything and would shout and bawl from the sidelines if any decision went against his team. When he was refereeing some of his decisions were debatable to say the least. I wasn't the only teacher that commented about him and no school liked to play against his boys.

The other school's team was run by the janitor, who also made sure that every decision went his team's way when he was refereeing. When we were due to go to his school to play, I phoned to ask what type of pitch they had. He assured me that it was a blaes pitch, 'red ash' we called it in Glasgow, so I made sure my boys were wearing moulded boots. When we got there he led both teams across the road to what was supposed to be a grass pitch. There was hardly any grass and the previous day's rain had left it looking like Paschendale! I, of course, confronted him about this. His answer was that the school's pitch was, in fact, blaes but he had never said anything about playing on it! Needless to say my team just slid and fell everywhere and was soundly thrashed!

When I moved to Edinburgh I continued to run the school's football training and encouraged girls to take part as well as boys. There was no league or anything and local schools were not interested so I was constantly on the lookout for competitions to enter. There was an interesting one taking place at Meadowbank one year and I made sure we entered both our boys' and girls' teams. It was open to any under -twelve team, not just schools, and was a knockout competition. It was also a real eye-opener.

The pack we got about the competition told us that the games would be played on astro-turf and that teams should not wear boots but trainers instead. Of course, come Saturday, there was one team, as there always is, wearing moulded boots. This was some team, not a school team, run by a wee, fat guy dressed in the regulation puffy jacket. He went mental when I said his team should be wearing trainers and shouted, 'Mouldies! Mouldies!' at me. We went to check with the organiser, who was apologetic. Yes, teams should be wearing trainers but it wasn't in the rule-book, an ad-hoc document just drawn up for the competition. He thought he could rely on the integrity of the people running the teams. The wee guy in the puffy jacket, feeling vindicated, refused to remove the football boots and, of course, his team won every game it played, mainly by stamping on the feet of the other boys!

Sunday, and the girls' competition arrived. Taking heart from his Saturday triumph, Mr Puffy-Jaikit turned up with a team of big heefers, who looked like they had been working on the oil rigs for a year or two. A quick check of the rule-book told us that the organisers had omitted to put in a maximum age, relying again on the integrity of the coaches. So, even though it was a competition for under-twelves, there was nothing anyone could do about these huge women sweeping all the girls aside. It was sickening to watch Mr Puffy-Jaikit celebrating his 'double' while his boys and 'girls' teams did a lap of honour in the tee-shirts they had won. The organisers were sickened as well and decided there and then that they would not be holding another such competition. They never did.

Quite a few parents, and kids for that matter, boldly shouted, 'Cheats!' at Mr Puffy-Jaikit and his teams. His retort was that the games had been 'won on the pitch!'

Any of this sounding familiar yet? There are always folk that will try and cheat, some that will comb the rules to exonerate them and others that are helpless to stop the cheating.

Lord Nimmo Smith was given the task of investigating whether Rangers broke the rules with their side contracts. The judgment he came up with is full of legal gobbledegook, intended to obfuscate the fact that his findings defy all logic. He found that Rangers did, indeed use side contracts and that they deliberately did not tell the SFA or the SPL about these side letters. So they were guilty but, in an amazing piece of legal jiggery-pokery, he says that they did not gain an unfair advantage. He says that he would have needed to have seen evidence of how the other teams did without these side contracts. So if he were judging the competition at Meadowbank I spoke of above, for example, he would argue that he had no evidence that the girls' team full of grown women did not constitute an unfair advantage since he could not guage how the other teams suffered from not having grown women on their teams!

Nimmo Smith has previous when it comes to overseeing a whitewash. In 1993 the police in Scotland were concerned about some judges, known as the 'Magic Circle,' who appeared to hand out softer sentences to certain people. Nimmo Smith, to the amazement of all, concluded that there was no such corruption taking place and accused the police of homophobia, even though there was evidence that some of the judges were closet homosexuals that were being blackmailed!

Nimmo Smith is also a practising Freemason, which should have excluded him from taking any part whatsoever in this investigation. Those Rangers fans, like Hateley, who talk of conspiracies would do well to remember that the appointment of Nimmos Smith is just another in a long line of ways in which our football authorities have tried to help their team.

So the triumphalist prose in our newspapers rather sticks in the throat. Green demands apologies, Sooperally demands the same, while David Murray calls it a 'witch-hunt.' Keith Jackson, in the Daily Record, calls for the resignations of Neil Doncaster and Stewart Regan. Of course, nobody in our media is interested in asking questions that need to be asked; the succulent lamb seems to be still on the menu. 

But no word from Traynor yet. He'll be cursing Nimmo Smith. His whole propaganda machine depends on Rangers being hard-done-by and this decision hardly fits his agenda. For years he told all and sundry that they were paranoid if they suggested that our football authorities were biased in favour of Rangers. He is the only one in this sorry saga that has ended up with egg on his face. We've just had further proof of the Establishment bending the rules to suit Rangers, while he desperately tries to claim that the opposite is true. What is he going to do now?