‘Outrageous’ – Jim White & Simon Jordan react to claim of big Celtic bias from SPFL
Bill Leckie accused the SPFL of serious bias towards Celtic on talkSPORT on Wednesday and both Jim White and Simon Jordan were left outraged.
While Celtic are being accused of riding roughshod over the Covid rules with a ‘training camp’ in Dubai, Leckie said that other Scottish teams were being given absolutely no leeway.
Celtic’s trip was brought up in Scottish parliament, with Nicola Sturgeon saying it needed looking into after shots of Neil Lennon supping a pint by the pool on a lounger did the rounds on social media.
But, according to Leckie, the big problem goes further back.
“They say they’re going for warm-weather training… I’m sure it’s something every single one of us would like to be doing now,” Leckie said on the White & Jordan show (talkSPORT, Wednesday, 11.30am).
“My points here is with the SPFL. They said at the start of the season that on pain of death they wouldn’t change the fixture list because it was far too crowded.
“And yet, they have made an exception to move a game for Celtic this weekend. They’re the ones who are culpable here.
“Back in September, St Mirren went to them and said, ‘Listen, we’ve got three games in a week but all three of our goalkeepers are quarantining because of positive tests.’
“They said there’s no room to postpone fixtures. They had to play three games with a borrowed keeper and lost all three games. When St Mirren and Kilmarnock had players out in October and had to cancel games the SPFL said ‘It’s your fault, we’ll give you 3-0 defeats for every game you have to postpone and a £40,000 suspended fine’.
“Yet, when Celtic ask to go on holiday they say, ‘Yep, no problem at all’. That’s where the problem is.”
“So it’s one rule for one and another rule for others,” Jim White pointed out.
“How is the SPFL allowed to do this?” Jordan said. “The hypocrisy, the double standards, the elite mentality, and if that is indeed the case, it’s ultimately outrageous.
“If St Mirren were subjected to an outcome they couldn’t alter, but because it’s Celtic they are able to do it, then there’s something fundamentally wrong.”
And Leckie wasn’t finished. “There’s another twist,” he said. “The second [of those three games for St Mirren] was against Celtic. It was a rearranged game because the original had been postponed after Celtic player Boli Bolingoli broke Coronavirus rules.
“Now Celtic had that game postponed, they weren’t punished, they weren’t fined, they had no points taken off them. They were allowed to rearrange that fixture and they won that replayed game.”
Terrible indictment of Scottish football
What more needs to be said.
Leckie’s account is a pretty crushing assessment of the SPFL and the bias they show towards Celtic.
It’s not doing them any good, though, and while Celtic are drinking pints in the sun, after playing a wreck of a season, public opinion is seriously mounting against both them and the SPFL.
Despite all of this, and we’ve talked a lot about the Celtic bias before, Rangers are crushing on the pitch and doing everything by the book.
We hope serious questions will be asked of Celtic. And while we’re sure social media will now be flooded by pictures of the players training, Neil Lennon himself has said already that it’s more for R&R.
They shouldn’t be allowed to get away with it, but we doubt it will be the SPFL that take any action.
In other Rangers news, ‘Big loss’ – Exclusive: McLeish reacts to major new injury blow for Rangers