Trial by Sportscene is not guilty of leading charge against players

[ian1964 10,622]

SOME people would have you believe that Sportscene now so closely resembles Crimewatch that Rob Maclean should finish each show by saying "don't have nightmares".

 

Diving, punching, shoving, angry gestures, off-the-ball stuff: it's all there, shown well after the watershed so that kiddies are protected from the heinous events at Clydesdale Bank Premier League matches. The problem for BBC Scotland, and to a lesser extent fellow broadcasters Sky Sports and ESPN, is that they are getting blamed for showing it.

 

Sportscene and every other Scottish football show in history has always tended to take a kicking for one thing or another, but being called "clipes" and "grasses" for getting players into trouble with the SFA is a new development. The buzz phrase is "trial by Sportscene". Apparently, if the pesky cameras were switched off, players could go around giving the finger to fans to their hearts' content, with the SFA none the wiser.

 

Managers, players and even some supporters are getting it into their heads that the SFA have a new prosecutor, Vincent Lunny, whose job amounts to putting his feet up and settling down to watch Sunday night's Sportscene. Then, with his fingers on the pause and rewind buttons, he jots down his list of guilty men once Maclean et al have highlighted a dive, an up-yours gesture or whatever misdemeanour is flavour of the month. Sportscene shows and discusses something on a Sunday night and, lo and behold, the SFA announce a day or two later that Lunny thinks there's a case to answer and a player is prosecuted.

 

The "trial by Sportscene" line was coined by Stuart McCall, the Motherwell manager, after Michael Higdon appeared on the programme making a gesture to supporters, for which he was subsequently held to account by Lunny and disciplined by the SFA. In one sense McCall was right: Higdon's "offence" was inconsequential, a half-hearted gesture which few saw at the time and even fewer bothered about. It had none of the attitude or anger of Leigh Griffiths' two gestures to Hibernian supporters and it was a nonsense that he was punished.

 

But McCall was wrong to lay into Sportscene for that. It's not the media's job to censor incidents lest they get a player into trouble, nor to look after managers with whom they may have a fine working relationship. Higdon's behaviour was mentioned in newspapers for one reason: it was newsworthy. It was newsworthy because Griffiths' recent windmilling had made it so, and it was newsworthy because the SFA has been punishing players who do it. Sportscene and the papers would have failed had they not looked at Higdon and speculated that he, too, could be in trouble. Given that he had just scored, and so the cameras and media's eyes were inevitably trained on him, it is not as if he was unfairly picked out for doing something off the ball.

 

The notion that a television editor who is a fan of, say, Rangers, would omit something which could get his club into trouble is as groundless as saying a player who supports Celtic would not try his best to score against them.

 

In the current climate, Sportscene must be even more inclined to flag up controversial incidents, not less so. Managers cannot expect broadcasters to turn a blind eye to poor behaviour just because they tended to in the past. The rules have changed now because the SFA's new Fast Track procedures have created these immediate and high-profile retrospective punishments.

 

In doing so, they may have made a subtle but permanent change to the tone of football coverage on television. Cases used to get lost in the SFA's disciplinary mire, and issues about consistency of punishment were less conspicuous.

 

Right now it feels as though the SFA and the BBC are intertwined in a relationship which will bring only further criticism pouring down on both of them. Players weren't routinely banned for making gestures to supporters in the past. Fans talked about it, it added a layer to the player's reputation, and no-one went running to their mammy about it. Lunny opened a can of worms by deciding Griffiths might be deserving of punishment for his first, humdrum gesture to Rangers fans at Easter Road. Having established that as an offence, the SFA have no option but to continue flagging it up whenever something similar occurs. The media have no option but to keep showing and reporting anything which might lead to punishment, because the audience and readers demand it. And some hot-headed players, prone to copycat behaviour and recidivism, are always likely to oblige by doing it again.

 

Lunny has been kept under the parapet by the SFA but the time has come for him to clarify how he decides on who has a case to answer. Yes, it will seem a bit naff for him to admit "I watch what happens on the telly" but of course he does. It would be inexcusable if he didn't.

 

But he must also address a charge of his own, of being over-zealous. Sportscene differs from Crimewatch in one fundamental regard: much of its content only deserves chat, not charges.

 

http://www.heraldscotland.com/sport/opinion/trial-by-sportscene-is-not-guilty-of-leading-charge-against-players.16620274

[GovanAllan 0]

Absolute crap if this guy thinks the Media witch hunt that springs up whenever a player farts the wrong (of course Septic players never fart) has nothing to do with who gets banned and who doesn't he needs his head examined.

 

When was the last time a player got a ban that came out of nowhere and hadn't been highlighted by the Scottish meda machine.