Outrage at Easter Road – what you may have missed…

After the backlash over Friday’s incident at Easter Road involving James Tavernier and a ‘fan’, much soul-searching has been committed over the state of the game on both sides of the border following similar events in England.

However, while the two in England were extremely unsavoury at best, the Tavernier incident included a small and deeply worrisome moment which many observers have alluded to.

We will never know if they were right, but it does appear the assailant briefly attempts to reach into his back pocket for something, and we couldn’t imagine what that might have been.

If anything more serious had come of this confrontation, we have to say we fear not only for James Tavernier’s safety, but the future of the game in Scotland, period.

As commenters have said – if a bampot wants to do this, a bampot is going to do this. We can’t stop it, but we can manage it better, and clearly security measures recently have been unable to prevent these sickening images tarring the British game.

The public outcry if Tavernier had been attacked more seriously than he was would have been on unprecedented levels, a watershed moment for sport in this country.

It’s not unprecedented, period though. Older readers will know well the Steffi Graff Monica Seles stabbing, for example, of the 90s, the moment which probably robbed the latter of being the greatest player in women’s history. Stabbed in 93, on court, already having won a frightening eight slams at the age of 21, she only won one more in her career.

So this is the kind of impact a horror incident like this can happen, and for it not to happen again requires intense vigilance and responsibility from supporters.