Andy’s Sting In The Tale (17/04/26) "Why the Top-Down Lack of Confidence?"

We have a place at the World Cup.

Our SPFL and WSPFL leagues are all more competitive than ever.

But the own goal that is ‘insecurity’ is a constant cancer right through our game.

I say that after our authorities recently banned one of our more combative, mouthier, but also maybe more insightful pundits from Hampden.

I found that particular move more unsavoury than anything Michael Stewart has or could have ever have said.

I disagree with lots of what he spouts and especially his rigidities and inability to praise when praise is due, but can’t fault his balanced and well composed post-ban summary for the hungry media.

“Instead of trying to silence voices of dissent, the Scottish FA should be engaging with us, answering our questions, and explaining their position. All football commentators should be free to express an opinion, without being denied access to the places we go to do our jobs”.

Well said Michael, you are right.

This has all reminded me of and brought me back to ‘Reg’ the co-founder from our last fan group banning both me and the rest of our now ‘Scottish Football Union’ team last summer because he didn’t like and in reality couldn’t countenance people having an alternative view to his own.

A further parallel was also the recent BBC’s Phil McLaughlin banning by a top club and there have been others.

All that kind of shit is a rocky, nasty and self-defeating series of ‘wrong paths’.

Anyway a quick ‘Friday Morning Google’ shows that sometimes people with power do indeed ‘closing down criticisms’ is their best way forward.

It’s a practice writ large all over the world from Iran to the USA with Russia and China and North Korea somewhere in the mix.

But that doesn’t make it right.

So this all got Andy digging and here are four quotes fresh off the interweb about clumsy closing downs, i.e. censorship to get you thinking.

“Censorship reflects a societies lack of confidence in itself”, Potter Stewart. (An American lawmaker and senior judge)

“Without the freedom to offend, freedom of expression ceases to exist”, Salman Rushdie.

Julian Assange

“What does censorship reveal? It reveals fear”, Julian Assange.

And my favourite came from an American author of specialist teenage books, Laurie Halse Anderson.

“Censorship is the child of fear and the father of ignorance”.

That phrase alone is a ‘lifetime achievement’ for any writer and I’m ashamed I’d never came across it before.

As for the way out of this current Scottish Football hole.

All it takes guys on either side is a phone call and a coming together with listening on both sides to show ‘we are actually united by caring so deeply about the game, not divided’.

Time to bang some heads, methinks.

This Week’s Sting

1. Run-in Excitement Mounts

2. Pyramid Play Offs

3. Outnumbered by Rugby

4. USA Hotels Starting to Blink?

5. Will They Won’t They?

1. Horses, Final Straits, Six Real Prizes and Some Nasty Black Holes

All 6 SPFL Leagues are set for Grandstand Finishes at both ends.

At the Top, Potential Male Champions

Hearts, Rangers, Celtic

St Johnstone, Partick.

ICT, Stenhousemuir.

East Kilbride, Spartans.

At the Top Female Champions

Hearts. Rangers, Glasgow, Celtic.

Kilmarnock, Spartans

At the Wrong End it’s as tough as that place in rural France, from memory it’s called Buggery

Male Riskers

Aberdeen, Dundee, St Mirren, Kilmarnock, Livingston

Morton, Airdrie, Ross County

East Fife, Cove, Hamilton, Kelty

Edinburgh City

Female Riskers

Hamilton, Aberdeen

St Johnstone, East Fife, Stirling

Imagine a bet that got all the winners and losers right?

2. Just as Tough at the (Non-League) Tops

Last week we saw a Highland League last day climax where both Brora and Brechin both had the chance to win.

Brora eventually scraped a draw but Brechin came away with nothing in their match so now Brora head to the play offs as Championes.

But against whom?

Tomorrow we’ll know after the battle of the ‘Lowland Roses’.

Linlithgow take on last year’s big time losers, third placed Bonnyrigg who can still theoretically make it but would have to win by 12 goals and hope Caledonian Braves beat Clydebank.

That won’t happen.

So Edinburgh City now await whoever as they have drifted too far off the SPFL pace and they will have to fight to hold on to their fairly recently won elevation.

As a lover of the now open pyramid I also feel for the clubs dropping out and think there are real undealt-with issues.

Mainly the sheer gap between the monies available between the SPFL2 and the 5th levels.

This year out of 18 Lowland League clubs we have Bonnyrigg 3rd, Berwick 10th, Cowdenbeath 11th, Albion, 14th and East Stirling propping the league up at 18th.

All flailing and failing.

A plea to the authorities, this wee competition should all be commercialised and on TV too.

3. Are We Underselling Our Women’s Game?

This week there was a press call announcing that our women’s game was booming and that’s great news because it is with some great people behind it.

But a crowd of less than 5000 at Easter Road for our World Cup qualifier against Belgium to me was and is disappointing.

Especially when Edinburgh will see a crowd at Murrayfield tomorrow backing our Rugby Women vs the Red Roses.

Albeit they are World Champions and will have a substantial away crowd with them.

But 30,000 so far shows the potential.

I just think our women’s game needs more.

More promoting, real support from the grass roots up, proper integration and media involvement.

We need to start thinking cleverer and accept that it is different to what we do elsewhere and needs the investment of time and brain power.

4. You Can Fool...

There is a famous American quote attributed to Abraham Lincoln.

It goes, “You can fool some of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.”

The USA Hotel industry is already discovering that when they had collectively ganged up to rip off football fans that what they want ‘to make’, doesn’t just happen because they ‘want it’.

Hotel prices are so far down 33% and heading south in New York and Boston.

Scott Yesner the head and founder of ‘Bespoke Stays’ said this week, “I’m seeing a lot of hotel people reviewing policy and starting to lower their planned rates. Yields will be sub-par”.

One other quote read, “High ticket prices, High general prices, and international anti-USA sentiment are combining to potentially create a potential perfect storm.

I hope the Boston bus people and the Boston train robbers who want $95, and $80 for a 22 mile trip find their greed is a form of self-abuse.

And I hope there will be crowd gaps aplenty in the ‘Cauldrons of Fifa Greed’.

I really, really hope it is all a bloody nose for Jahnnie.

5. Just How Did Infantino Explain His Peace Prize in Farsi?

Infantino

By that I mean to the Iranian Team Party on his recent trip to Antalya where Iran had a friendly against Costa Rica.

The Swiss man who personally created and awarded a distinctly bogus ‘Fifa Peace Prize’ said afterwards, “Iran will be there. The Players want to play, Iran is coming, Iran has to come. They represent their people, have qualified and want to come”.

He didn’t address the unprecedented situation where his ‘friend’ and the host of the World Cup has been bombing another Fifa member who have qualified, backed by another inside-clique Fifa member who are still staging domestic league games on disputed, aka stolen Palestinian lands.

I hope King Donald wears his Peace Prize to the final.

I like irony.

Andy’s Sting Blog

It has a mind and life of its own and comes from the ether each Friday.

Written by a long-time fan who is not a writer but a fan who has come to believe the game and what it can do and bring is more important than the weekly gossip that most in the game hide behind.

You know, the ins and outs, ups and downs, comings and goings, and toing and froings.

Great small talk and all vital for a day, sometimes less.

The good things in life are about balance and football in its ever increasing quest for monies constantly forgets that.

And as always feel free to write to me about anything in football or beyond.

Andy.smith@thesfu.co.uk

Andy’s Album of the Week

Clannad: In a Lifetime

Normally I apologise for picking collections but with the sad passing of Maire Brennan this week I was reminded just how many Clannad Albums I had collected over the years and I can’t pick one so it’s a best of.

This one was actually a distress purchase from a family USA road trip from Boston, Cape Cod, Nantucket, Massachusetts and greater New England.

The heavy sell FM and AM ads were doing my head in as we tootled around with our three wonderful weeks in an amazing part of the world.

So a trip to Borders and ‘In a Lifetime’, ‘A Day Without Rain’, ‘Kate and Anna McGarrigle’ and ‘Decade’ by Neil Young were great soundtracks in our very ugly Ford Dynasty we called the Dysentery.

the CDS were all half of what we would have paid at home too, not like World Cup prices facing us all.

Clannad came from Gweedore, an Irish speaking village of 2000 near the coast and western edges of Donegal and their music echoes with the loneliness, hardship, tunefulness, hope and all the other emotions that come from living on the edge of that windy world.

The band formed when a family decision was taken with 10 minutes to spare to enter the 1973 Folk Festival Competition in the comparatively ‘urban jungle’ of Letterkenny.

The hastily created name was ‘Clann as Dobhar’ but punters like me couldn’t say that so it was shortened to Clannad a few years later.

And in Letterkenny they won.

£500 Irish, a recording session with Polydor and the real prize was a musical future.

This was pre the amazing Eithne, Enya, joining 7 years later.

I missed their first few albums but discovered them in 1978 on a fishing trip in the wild west of Ireland when a pub group were copying them.

I once read that their music was ‘Haunting Vocal Magic’, and would agree.

This album kicks off with ‘In a Lifetime’, then ‘Harry’s Game’, then the Haunting ‘I Will Find You’ from Last of the Mohicans.

For me the omission of Lady Marian was a mistake but also a good reason to buy other Clannad Records.