Glenn Gibbons: El Clasico stats put Old Firm into perspective

SPANISH football’s flagship event may be regarded in some quarters as the most appropriately-named occasion in the world game – El Clasico – but to those of a less gullible mindset, live broadcasting of the meetings between Barcelona and Real Madrid have become a form of car-crash TV.

The fixture is also an irresistible lure for those high rollers who get their kicks from counting cards, betting on bad behaviour rather than the goals total that will separate the winners from the losers. Their enthusiasm for the contest became understandable on hearing an astonishing statistic from Sky’s Gerry Armstrong during the course of this week’s renewal, this time in the national knockout competition, the Copa del Rey: the eight matches before Wednesday’s joust at the Bernabeu Stadium had delivered nine red cards and 58 yellows.

By the end of the night, the average had been maintained with another seven cautions and, if the referee had not been shamefully neglectful, there would have been at least another two orderings-off.

These are figures which, if produced by a series of Old Firm collisions, would have the Scottish media – and probably the Holyrood government – lamenting the collapse of morality on a national scale and demanding the return of capital punishment on the assurance that the country was the subject of pan-European, if not global, ridicule and condemnation.

This is and always has been, of course, an imagined notoriety. Until Armstrong’s revelation three nights ago, there seemed to be no inkling outside Spain of a series of delinquent behaviour and disciplinary measures which, in Scotland, would have scandalised the nation.

Celtic signings buck the trend

Supporters jaded by the humdrum of certain newspapers’ fondness for using the transfer window as a vehicle for wide-ranging speculation and reports of imminent activity that make no sense will surely have perked up at the news of Celtic’s two acquisitions this week.

There is, after all, something quite delicious about the realisation that the first signings of this short open season – Jaroslav Fojut and Rabiu Ibrahim – should not have been given so much as a mention among the confetti of “exclusives”.