Influence - Moi!!!

I don't know if Hughie Dallas and the other honchos of the SFA's referees department read this blog - so I am not getting too smug.

However, less than a week after my imaginary conversation between HD and Dougie McDonald, I see Neil Lennon - aka "Ginger Whinger II" was banished to the stand at Tynecastle.

I fear Celtic's serial moaning about refereeing bias against them might be coming home to roost.

Memo to Dr Reid, Mr Lawuntohimself and GWII - a period of silence on refereeing matters might be appropriate.

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MUCH celebrating in the streets of Gorgie and Leith this week, after Hearts and Hibs socked it to the Old Firm on the same night. The Hootsman has since pointed out that this double whammy last happened in 1972.

If it gives the Edinburgh pair the belief to make it happen more-regularly, it will be to the benefit of Scottish football.

I have long maintained, the Old Firm are not that much better than the rest, but usually start a goal to the good, since the mind-set within Scottish football when other clubs face them is damage limitation.

Be Scottish, have a go at them - it might pay-off more-often than once every 28 years.

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THE remainder of this blog is given over to a rant from my very good friend Aristotle Armstrong, the Scottish Rugby Philosopher. Aristotle, a former hooker, has trenchant views on the future and direction of the SRU, which he tries to air, in spite of a restraining order served on him by Murrayfield.

I have nothing against you soccer johnnies; by and large you may have been denied the benefits of a classical education at the Academy, Oxford and Sandhurst, followed by a short service commission and a lucrative spell with a city hedge fund.

You may also not be party to the wide-ranging intellectual discussions in the 19th at Muirfield, but, should the Hun ever give us a spot of bother in the future, we in the officer classes can trust you humble clansmen to "gie it some welly" as you say, when the going gets rough and the fighting dirty.

But I do wish you would keep your quaint soccer habits out of the chaps' game.

Just this week I almost spilled my G&T when I read in The Hootsman, that young Michale Blair had been handed "the captain's arm band" for Saturday's Murrayfield clash with the black-clad sheep worriers.

When I had finished choking, I penned a swift memo to young Walker, who normally runs a very tight ship on the sports desk at the foot of Holyrood Road.

He's a good sort is Walker, an East Fife zealot who actually turns up and watches games from the terraces, but I've suggested he gives one or two of his sub-editors a severe rucking.

This captain's arm-band is a continental affectation, which I understand first surfaced on this island in the mid-fifties, when some English club, Wolverhampton Wanderers or something, played a couple of high-profile floodlit friendlies, agains Hungarian side Honved and Moscow Spartak. These matches were televised live across the nation and commentator Kenneth Wolstenholme remarked that the Spartak captain wore a white arm-band to signify that only he had the authority to speak to the referee.

It took a wee while, but, gradually this practice caught-on, until today, football team captains all wear their little arm-bands with the same pride (if slightly less authority) as a newly-commissioned Second Lieutenant passing-out of Sandhurst sports his new "pip".

Indeed, one German sportswear company Uhlsport, even produces an arm-band marked "Spielfuhrer", which I suppose might hold a certain cachet for latter-day followers of the moustached little Austrian house painter.

However, we don't need such fripperies in the gentleman's game. Crammed as the ranks of our rugger teams are, with chaps of the right sort, the result of years of good breeding and buggery at our better schools; rugger chaps immediately know whom are their leaders. We do not need an arm-band to signify that some jumped-up oick can question the match official, we just know.

I trust therefore that the sub-editors on the Hootsman, coming as they largely do from a soccer background, will get the message - THERE ARE NO CAPTAIN'S ARM-BANDS IN RUGBY UNION FOOTBALL.

Rant over - back to you Socrates old boy.