ian1964

The only commodity any of us have as parents when our kids take part in sport is trust.If you didn’t have it, you’d never let them out the house. The institutions in whom you place that trust have to be beyond reproach – so what price Celtic’s reputation for it this week?After another former Celtic Boys Club ‘coach’ – Jim McCafferty – joined Jim Torbett and Frank Cairney behind bars, and Gerrard King as a convicted child sex offender, it’s long past time for them to take ownership of this monstrous strand of their past and say sorry.Because the parents of the victims of these evil-doers had trust in their institution – and look where it got them.It would be a tragedy if Celtic’s continuing refusal to apologise, their increasingly pitiful denial of an explicit link with the Boys’ Club and their lack of desire to see a full-blown independent enquiry leads to a further erosion of that trust from a single parent of a single kid.Make no mistake, these scum are not the norm. We’ve run the Grassroots Awards for 15 years now with the Scottish FA, we’ve rewarded hundreds of volunteers who have enhanced kids’ lives in every corner of the country – 50-year servants, absolute football saints without whom the game wouldn’t exist.Likewise at the Scottish Sports Awards, which we run with sportscotland, the list of local heroes in boxing, golf, volleyball, basketball, table tennis and every other sport is limitless. As a nation we rely on them to function. Sport simply doesn’t exist without them.We cannot afford to be looking at everyone with a sideways glance, because 99.99 per cent of those who are involved in coaching kids are there with the purest of hearts and the greatest of intentions.To put a smile on a kid’s face, keep them off the street, give them a set of values to steer them through life.But the victims of Torbett, Cairney, McCafferty and King walked through the doors of Celtic Boys Club entitled to expect the exact same things.Which is why this needs a full independent enquiry, backed by the government and football authorities.And Celtic should be front and centre in demanding its instigation, irrespective of the consequences for them. Anything less now would be institutionally immoral.As a current board, obviously no-one is attaching blame, they’re generations removed from the sins of their forebears, but they have an obligation to their roots as well as their shareholders. An obligation to the very concept of Celtic.Their vast cash reserves and trail of recent success on the park means they’re doing their job in a corporate sense very well.But where’s their social responsibility? Where’s the heritage of the club being founded to help the needy when they’re still hiding behind the claim that their links with Celtic Boys Club were tenuous and informal?I probably know a couple of dozen guys who played with Celtic Boys Club at one point or another, and had these beasts as their coaches. I’ve heard so many anecdotes that make your skin crawl hearing them now, but for them at the time, and even for some now, they weren’t conditioned to feel what they were experiencing was abuse. I’ve spoken to those who’ll laugh about the handing out of chocolate biscuits as rewards to the ‘special’ kids, with sniggers around the dressing room about who got what and why. I’ve heard them talk about the ones who wouldn’t let kids return from injuries until they’d examined them, never mind what the doctor says. Spoken to a senior coach with a long-standing career in the game who still shudders at the memory of getting a lift home every week from one of them, but not being the last dropped off despite living in the furthest away house. That ‘privilege’ went to the quiet kid who lived a few streets back. Yet also to a guy who had a top professional career in the game on both sides of the border who invited one of these men to their wedding 15 years after last playing for him, who wouldn’t hear a word said against him.While there are others whose lives have ground to a halt through guilt and regret at ‘letting things happen’, their victimhood taking the ultimate toll.Each of these men owns their own memories. They’re not ours to judge, nor is it our right to expect any of them to share them in public.Those who have, and who prompted the righteous convictions of these evil men, have done so with bravery but not everyone could have dealt with the trauma involved.But make no mistake, each of these kids went to Celtic Boys Club with one thing in mind – that they were on the pathway to play for Celtic. The notion they were anything else, or that the legal separation of the two entities meant anything to any of them, is risible. Which made their statement in November following the conviction of Torbett inadequate then and even more wince-inducing now. Deep regret and sympathy for the victims is akin to the Trump-esque ‘thoughts and prayers’ to victims of mass gun crime in America. The absence of the word ‘sorry’ from any of it, whether it’s on the advice of a QC or not, is shameful, as is their insistence on the use of the phrase ‘entirely separate organisation’ and their attempt to spread the blame around.“The abuse of children is an issue affecting many areas of society, including a large number of football clubs, sports clubs, youth organisations, educational institutions and religious bodies across Britain…”.Well, that’s true – but when it’s right on your own doorstep, who else is going to deal with it?On Friday our sister paper revealed evidence of a Celtic ‘investigation’ in the 1980s, when the issue was first raised, clearing the wrong-doers of culpability and calling the accusations ‘scurrilous’. If they had done the right thing then, how much suffering could have been avoided by how many children in the two decades of abuse that followed?Also the growing evidence linking the perpetrators at Celtic with former Crewe coach Barry Bennell – jailed for 30 years and branded ‘the devil incarnate’ by the judge who sentenced him – is nauseating and now looking to be far too plentiful to be coincidental.Childhoods have been stolen. Innocence tragically scalpeled out of young lives. These victims deserve a full and heartfelt apology, said like its meant by an organisation some of whose past directors facilitated kids’ dreams turning into dark nightmares, who tolerated it, who even covered it up, judging by the paucity of their attempts to stop it in its tracks more than 30 years ago. They deserve compensated.More than that, though, while they can’t rewrite history for the victims of yesterday, a proper investigation now might find ways to stop it happening today and tomorrow.Surely a Celtic board with scruples would find that reason enough, even if their predecessors didn’t?

Into the final, 1-0 win

No idea mate!

FIVE Academy players will depart the club this summer to play their football elsewhere. https://rangers.co.uk/news/academy-news/five-to-depart-academy/

Aye, we all know, but I always enjoy the ridiculous, spurious links to players?

Can't understand some Rangers fans that want our most exciting talented young striker in years not being involved in the first team and in fact want rid off him!!. Unless there is a huge fee involved I want him to stay and improve his game, he terrifies defences and knows where the goal is. A striker we could not afford if we were to try and buy him now!.