Clean up your act SFA

Clean Sport Week – the UK Anti-Doping’s annual campaign against drug-taking – comes to an end today. The Scottish Football Association and new chief executive Ian Maxwell have, in their own words, thrown their full weight behind this. Fine sentiments for sure, but precious little muscle. In the latest available figures for the first three months of this year there were just 12 drug tests – or one a week – in the four Scottish leagues, when around 300 matches were played. Mind you that’s a massive improvement on last season when, as the Sunday Herald exclusively revealed, there were no tests across nine months.

It’s also embarrassingly paltry compared to England where 1383 tests were carried out in the same period. There are 92 professional teams in the four English leagues, as against 42 in Scotland, so you’d expect, with the same level of commitment, more than 600 tests here. It looks even worse when you look across a full year – 4,082 tests in England, compared to 164. Even Scottish Rugby managed more tests in three months than the SFA!

Also, down south, there are twice as many tests out of competition as on the day, whereas in Scottish football they only take place after matches. In almost all other sports, including athletics, tennis, cycling, swimming and boxing – the majority of testing is done in home visits away from competition. The SRU does the bulk of them this way. In these other sports athletes also have to tell UKAD their whereabouts every day so that surprise checks can be made and they’re punished if they miss them – like former Manchester United player and now TV pundit Rio Ferdinand who was banned for eight months and fined £50,000 in 2003.

The SFA’s Maxwell can’t be held responsible for the abysmal record – the perennial excuse is lack of money and, to be fair, the FA is far more prosperous than the blazers of Hampden – he’s only days in the door and he must be a good egg, as a former Partick Thistle player and CEO, so the Diary asked him what he would do about it? And whether the SFA would introduce out-of-competition testing?

So? Nothing so far. Despite phoning and emailing several times. Perhaps they have all gone to Peru, seeking Paddington’s forebears? It can’t be about a meaningless friendly.

Mini misadventure

In what some might call another piece of brazen Union Jackery (or, alternatively, yawn) this promises to be a stushie to trump even the great whisky takeaway. You may recall that the Scottish Government was accused of leaning on Marks & Spencer in a labelling row over Scots goods, with our uisge beatha branded by M&S as produced in Great Britain, not Scotland. Following the intervention, allegedly prompted by uber-Nats, Marks quickly altered the description.

You don’t have to be a Nationalist to appreciate that marketing the stuff as Scotch – rather than, “made in Bletchley” for instance – probably has better sales appeal to punters, particularly ones abroad.

But while they’ll never take our spirit, they’ve gone and stolen our taillights!

All new factory-produced Mini cars come with Union Jack-embossed lights at the back, half of the flag on one side, the other half on the other. There is no opting out. No compromise. No customised saltires or even the usual humble plastic ones which shatter if you back into a feather. Verboten, as the manufacturers would say.

When it was launched Mini was seen as the quintessential British car (remember the movie The Italian Job), but it wasn’t of course. it was designed by the Greek-born Alex Issigonis and after going through several hands it’s now owned by BMW. And while, like whisky, you might think that having that British legacy might help sales abroad and in Europe, it’s not so. All non-Brit Minis (or foreign ones as we will have to say apres Brexit) come without the offending decal. Not a single black eagle on a taillight in Germany, or a tricolour in France.

All of which has SNP-voting, potential Mini customers up in arms (well a couple have contacted the Diary, if IPSO is monitoring this) and are vowing to import their cars from across the Channel. I can’t begin to describe the reaction from the Falls Road.

The charming chap from BMW denied that there had been a backlash against the taillights, “on the contrary we have had a brilliant response”. He confirmed that there were no other flag designs and none were planned and that the Union Jack wouldn’t be dropped any time soon.

In fact, he went on, British customers were getting a bonus because behind the flags were LED bulbs, while other all the other countries were getting the cheaper halogen ones. I’m sure that makes sense.

You could say that this an issue with traction, which will rumble on and probably even accelerate before everyone gets tyred of it.

The price of defame

I understand that The Digger, the essential weekly magazine on crime and ne’er-do-wells, has had to make a huge libel payment to a student because it used his picture in a piece it ran, rather than the real convicted paedophile. There can’t be anything worse than being accused of being a paedo when you are entirely innocent, so I can understand why the victim – I won’t name him here and add to his misery ¬– pursued it because, courtesy of the digital age, it may dog him his entire life. It was a genuine mistake, but what a humdinger. It would be a shame if The Digger went under because of this. Jimmy, I hope you have it covered?

Knight entrant

Still in the legal vein, a fight has broken out in the publishing world with a new competitor squaring up to Scottish Legal News, the free daily email newsletter for lawyers run by my old chum, Dundee’s very own Graham Ogilvy. The new entrant, Legal Matters Scotland, is covering exactly the same beat as SLN so it looks like a fight to the death. Legal Matters is owned by serial director Martin Knight through his company Early Morning Media. Knight has an interesting CV. He’s still involved with Notable Abodes and Grave Care International – which does exactly what it says on the tombstone, cares for graves – but sadly his company Cockney Knees-Up has collapsed.