Hearts Fans Report Linesman

Hearts fans sitting in the Wheatfield Stand on Saturday are to make an official complaint to the SFA about the antics of assistant referee Willie Dishington during the match against Dunfermline.

Dishington was, according to many fans in the Section D area, attempting to wind up the crowd and allegedly challenged one of them to a fight!

However having seen many comments relating to this incident on various message boards this morning, it sounds to me like Dishington, from Motherwell, was taking all manner of ridiculous abuse before he reacted. It rarely fails to amaze me that some football supporters can shout the most hate-filled abuse at a player or official, but if their victim so much as even looks at them, all hysteria breaks out because of the ‘gross misconduct’ being shown by a professional.

Granted, I don’t believe that these guys should be engaging in arguments with the crowd – it’s ill-advised and could potentially spark a riot. However if you think about it from a purely human point of view, is it any surprise that the guy told one of these imbeciles where to go after taking the sort of abuse I’m led to believe it was? I said exactly the same thing when Eric Cantona kicked that guy in the crowd in the mid-’90s. Yes Cantona was wrong in what he did and if Dishington was doing what’s been alleged, he was wrong also. But I can’t help thinking that there’s a certain amount of justice when one of these neanderthals gets a bit of the same treatment back. I wonder if the guy that Cantona assaulted has ever run down 12 rows of stairs to abuse a football player since? Hmmm.

That said though, it will be interesting to see how the SFA will handle this if several fans all write to them about the same thing. They tend to take a pretty dim view of this sort of thing and their man IS in the wrong despite what I said about the abuse he was taking. However Hearts are not exactly their favourite club, so what are the bets that this one will be swept under the carpet just the Andy Davis incident was a couple of years back? In fact, maybe we’ll get ourselves another nice little fine out of this on some previously unknown technicality!