Dianne Millen explores the most suitable means of preventing incursions on to the pitch by fans
When is a pitch invasion not a pitch invasion? When there’s only one person involved, of course, as happened twice in the second weekend of the new Scottish Premier League campaign. Amid the debate among the condemnatory, permatanned pundits about whether a single fan constituted an “invasion”, however, were serious safety questions.
The headlines were about English infiltration after trouble at Pittodrie. But the Scottish game would do better to take a long, hard look at itself, says Dianne Millen
Never mind Afghanistan – hold the front page for the Battle of Pittodrie, billed as the biggest Scots skirmish since Culloden. The coins had barely been picked up from pitchside before SPL chief executive Roger Mitchell had fallen back on that old stand-by, blaming the violence on “mindless morons”, a description later repeated by the police, press and both clubs. Idiots there most certainly were at the game, but not all of them were throwing things.
Foreigners both obscure and notorious are flooding into Scotland. Gary Oliver suggests some clubs may have bought better than others
If Jim McLean is proved to have cut the lip of BBC reporter John Barnes, it will be a rare instance of a Dundee United man hitting the target this season. The team, like the former manager and chairman, has become a parody of its former self. At Tannadice there no longer appears to be a quality control department, and the club is recruiting increasingly obscure foreign players of dubious ability.