Ange and an email

Football is about moments and memories.

Yesterday Celtic took me back to a dark November night in 2010.

That’s the last time the Hoops recorded a 9-0 score line.

In that drubbing, a home victory, Celtic had three penalties.

At Tannadice yesterday, the Hoops had a front three who scored SEVEN times from open play.

So this is what Angeball 2.0 looks like.

I had another reason to remember that night in November twelve years ago.

It was just after the final whistle that I published this story.

Despite some SFA firefighting, the scoop would lead to Hugh Dallas’s sacking as head of referee development.

This site is fully searchable, and you can find the stories I published in November/December 2010 about what became known as the “Dallas Email Affair”.

It pointed to what could happen if Scottish football had a properly functioning Fourth Estate.

The Guardian picked up the story and thought it newsworthy.

As ever with any journalistic scrutiny on Planet Fitba, it requires outsiders to step in as the local media obeyed the succulent rules.

The SFA  was also the story at the weekend when this, apparently, is not a foul.

Dermot Gallagher, the retired referee in England with a name that the Ibrox klanbase would consider to be suspiciously Irish sounding, called it as a straight red.

This is the sort of decision that turns a game.

At that stage, the contest was 0-0, and it was early into the first half.

In a post-match interview, Sevco’s likeable, straight-talking Dutch manager seemed to be bemused, grateful and perhaps slightly embarrassed when asked about the incident.

“Lucky” was the word he used.

I suspect that Sevco’s “luck” will be in evidence as young Mr Sands and his colleagues in Norwegian Blue try to cope with a Celtic front three that pass and move with pace, purpose and precision.

Regardless of the officials at Celtic Park next week for the visit of the ten-year-old club, there will be a complete absence of journalistic scrutiny on their inevitable inexplicable officiating errors.

It has ever been thus.

Here’s another outsider who is paying attention to the random errors that seem, for some reason, to often favour the Ibrox franchise.

In 2010 I thought that my scoop on Hugh Dallas would prompt the local media to up their game and start looking into the SFA.

It was a wide-eyed naivete worthy of Pollyanna herself.

I doubt that the next league match at Parkhead will be an episode of the Glad Game.