How can the football authorities ask the fans to be more law abiding while allowing someone with Paul McGowan’s criminal history to earn a living from the game?
Dundee player McGowan has been convicted of his third assault on the police and once again has done his very own Houdini act and escaped a jail term. People quite reasonably ask how this can come about.
As a professional footballer, even in the Scottish game where every penny is a prisoner (no pun intended) McGowan must live a more prosperous life than the average football fan yet he still chooses to pursue a life of reoffending and anti-social behaviour.
There is widespread public concern about levels of crime in Scotland, especially at election time. Crime and how to deal with it is near top of most political parties’ manifestos but having a low rate of imprisonment should mean we have low rates of crime not that some are treated in a special way because of the profession they are in.
It is no wonder parents are finding alternative sports and activities to take their kids to as football in this country is no longer the beautiful game.
Ranger’s fans despair at being demonized and jailed for singing songs with a certain word in it while thugs like McGowan walk away with a slap on the wrist. A large amount of tax payers’ money is spent on reoffenders like McGowan both in convicting them and monitoring them. Dundee FC say they will stand by the player but any attempt to change him is closing the door after the horse has bolted. How will Dundee react if a fan sets off a flare in their stadium, a life ban presumably?
The important thing is to deter young people from a life of crime, catch those that do commit crimes and to deal with them appropriately, but the result of this case makes that harder when we see that violence towards the police on more than one occasion is not a reason to be sent to jail.
The Dundee thug will miss two forthcoming games against former club Celtic because he is under house arrest.
He has also been placed on a 16-week restriction of liberty order which confines him to home between the hours of 7pm and 7am. McGowan will be laughing to himself as he once again beats the system and enjoys the liberty denied to a young Rangers fan. The message given out by the McGowan sentence is that crime and anti-social behaviour are now so much part of the norm of Scottish society, why bother jailing him.
Scottish football is without a sponsor and that’s not going to change anytime soon when the professional game allows a player to take the field with three criminal convictions for assault, so much for the integrity of the game.
The real victims in this are the people assaulted and injured by McGowan. Scottish football is now a game where bigots, racists, and violent thugs are the new role models and can take to the field to play the game, a game that is dying on its knees and unable to save itself from its own self-hatred. The acceptance that Paul McGowan can continue to play by the Scottish football authorities and Dundee FC is a new low in the game in this country and gives one more reason for people to turn their back on what was once the national sport.
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