Parochial stain on a global landscape

Sports Writer

Sunday 3 March 2013

International Football Association Board meetings like the one at the Balmoral Hotel in Edinburgh yesterday are usually an occasion to grill the likes of Fifa President Sepp Blatter and his general secretary Jerome Valcke, but yesterday it was Scottish Football Association chief executive Stewart Regan who fenced the awkward questions.

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By Stewart Fisher

With the reverberations from Lord Nimmo Smith's report into the use of EBTs at Rangers still being felt, there was never much prospect of the formation of two new advisory panels to consult on rule changes, alterations to the wording of the offside rule and further consultation on the dropped ball as a mechanism for restarting play dominating the parochial news agenda.

The only thing that might have was the almost by-the-way announcement kyboshing plans for the Russian and Ukrainian leagues to merge, a firm Fifa putdown that may yet impact on the Old Firm's long-held ambitions to head south to the land of milk and honey. But Regan found himself in the same default mode he has been in for the last 12 months, fighting a dogged rearguard action in defence of himself and his president Campbell Ogilvie in the wake of the Lord Nimmo Smith report, which found oldco Rangers guilty of serious non-disclosure of contractual details but came up with a penalty of just £250,000 – which even the chief executive admitted may be impossible to recover from what is now a shell company.Regan's one regret is that the future of Rangers was rolled into the league reconstruction debate, but particularly damaging for the chief executive is the perception that the stripping of titles itself became a bargaining chip in the horse-trading around the birth of the newco version of the Ibrox club. He sought to clarify the process yesterday."Collectively, we would refute any suggestions that we have done anything other than focus on what is good for Scottish football and to try to move the game forward," Regan said. "When the consortium interested in buying RFC approached the SFA, the leader of that consortium, asked through [newco commercial director] Imran Ahmed to outline what the worst possible punishments could be if they were found guilty of a number of crimes to football, for want of a better expression."What came on to the table was literally every possible sanction and issue that could be raised, from bringing the game into disrepute or the unknowns as we called them, which were still being discussed," he added. "None of us knew what the investigation into the Big Tax Case was going to be or what the outcome of the SPL's commission was going to be. So there had to be certain assumptions made, and at the request of the club everything that could have been levied on the club was put on the table."By comparison, the other aspects of the day's business seemed almost humdrum, with the main exception being an admission that the Qatar World Cup in 2022 could be moved to winter to avoid the blistering summer temperatures. Elsewhere, the definition of interfering with play/gaining an advantage in the offside ruling has been sharpened up, two new advisory panels – one of refereeing experts from around the globe and one including former players and coaches – will be formed to advise on rule changes, and although Uefa remain sceptical, governing bodies have the green light to introduce goal-line technology either for individual matches or competitions. While the FA are likely to go ahead at FA Cup matches as early as next season, with a six-figure sum required to install it, the SFA are more cagey, but may look at bringing it in for cup matches in the future. Perhaps Blatter had words of sympathy with his SFA host as the pair spent their afternoon together at Tynecastle.

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Parochial stain on a global landscape

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