Celebrations for the success of the Play Fair campaign, run by the Aberdeen Evening Express to secure a fair allocation of tickets for Aberdeen fans for the Scottish Cup Final, turned out to be premature.

Last week, HoldTheFrontPage reported that a delegation from the Evening Express, led by editor Donald Martin, had presented a 10,000-signature petition and a sea of faxes, e-mail print-outs and the result of a phone poll to Scottish Football Association chief executive David Taylor.

The newspaper, its readers and supporters were all calling for an equal 50-50 split of tickets available for the May 27 Tennents Cup Final between Aberdeen and Glasgow Rangers.

At the meeting, Mr Taylor pledged to guarantee a “sizeable allocation” of tickets and promised to urge his SFA executive committee to consider the benefits of a 50-50 split.

But within days, under the stark front page headline “You’re cheats”, the Evening Express reported that a committee of four men had decided to allocate 17,620 tickets to Aberdeen and 24,598 to Rangers for the match at Hampden Park.

A fifth member of the committee, vice-president Chris Robinson, was abroad on business and Mr Taylor was on holiday and not part of the decision-making process.

A press officer for the SFA told the newspaper the committee did not physically see the petition – which was gathered by the Evening Express in just two days – but was made aware of it along with other relevant letters from both clubs, supporters, and MPs and MSPs.

He added that a range of factors were taken into consideration including the size of support for each club and areas allocated by the clubs at recent matches at Hampden.

He pointed out that Aberdeen did not sell-out its full allocation of 18,000 tickets when it played Celtic in the CIS Cup Final at Hampden on March 19 – and returned 131 of them.

In an irate comment piece, editor Donald Martin blasted: “Football is a sport. Its fundamental principle is fair play. That’s why each side has 11 players, the same number of substitutes and no goals to start with. Remarkably, this tenet has escaped the Scottish Football Association, the organisation charged with upholding all that is good in the game.”

He compared the decision to give Rangers fans a third more tickets than Aberdeen fans to allowing them to field 15 players against Aberdeen’s 11.

On Easter Monday, the Evening Express splashed on the story again, to report that “Dons” chiefs had thrown in the towel and said nothing more could be done over the ticket allocation. But the club stressed that it would press for fairer treatment in the future.

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