I HAVE had a lot of reasons recently for considering the issue of anonymous allegations. I can understand that in some areas of life people must have the right to remain anonymous, especially when making allegations of criminal misconduct and particularly sexual criminal misconduct.

Yet ever since, as a junior reporter, I covered a trial where a man was accused of having underage sex with a girl of 14 – he was cleared after the girl admitted she had lied to him about her age – I have always believed that the accused in such cases should have the benefit of anonymity until proven guilty. The man in that case was identified in the press from the outset and was the victim of a vigilante attack before the case even went to trial.

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I also understand completely why whistleblowers in public service and corporate life need to be anonymous, while the use of pen names by writers is a venerable tradition, though only because such pen names are always admitted to.

Nowadays, sadly, almost every troll on the internet is anonymous. And yes, we believers in independence for Scotland have had a problem with so-called cybernats, which is why I believe that all pro-independence supporters on social media should use their real names – unless they fear a kicking from the nastier yoons out there, of which there are plenty. Yet surely there should be areas of Scottish society where anonymity is banned, and should not be permitted for those who hold, or have held, high office. I am thinking of sports administrators in particular, because right now our two major team sports are having serious problems with anonymous reports and allegations.

Former Scottish Football Association president George Peat is the name in the frame for a quite ludicrous rehash of a 10-year-old argument about Rangers getting an extension to the season because they faced such a huge fixture backlog when they reached the Uefa Cup final in 2008.

Peat says he won’t name the club chairman who contacted him to say that the SFA should not extend the season to accommodate Rangers. Forgetting that the Scottish Premier League did give an extension to their declared season, albeit of only four days, with the acquiescence of the SFA, Peat says he was disappointed that the chairman said what he said.

My recollection is that late in the season, only two clubs were competing for Scotland’s two places in the Champions League – yes, we used to get such luxuries – and Celtic eventually won the league to claim an automatic place in the Champions League group stage while Rangers went into the second qualifying round.

Motherwell were miles behind in third and went into the Uefa Cup first round, meaning there was only really one club who would benefit from Rangers playing so many games in a short space of time. Whether or not the answer is the obvious one, why not name them? After all, the chairman in question was doing nothing wrong, just standing up for his club the way, say, Dave King does at Ibrox.

Worse, much worse, is the current “anonymous” problem at the Scottish Rugby Union. Put simply, there’s a real risk that the governing body will attempt to sweep under the carpet the biggest scandal to hit the sport in years by keeping certain facts anonymous.

My sources within Scotland’s rugby community speculate that former solicitor general Lesley Thomson QC has kebabbed the Murrayfield leadership in her report into the Keith Russell affair. If she had exonerated them, goes the reasoning, the report would have been out long ago.

SRU board chairman Colin Grassie turned to Thomson in the wake of the very serious findings made by an employment tribunal against the SRU, whose chief executive, Mark Dodson, in particular, came in for criticism by the judge.

You may recall that the report was going to be published by “early September” and unless the calendar is wrong, today is September 20. Technically, I suppose it has been “published” in so far as the board and council of the SRU discussed it last week, but it has definitely not been published in the normal sense of the word.

So how much longer must the clubs and the whole Scottish rugby community wait? And how much of the report will be published?

I was told yesterday by a senior SRU official that the report may be redacted and there is no date for publication as yet – these two things will apparently be decided “in due course”.

The SRU must publish the full report and not hide behind anything as silly as data protection laws. If they do not publish the document, especially if they is damned by report, there will not be shred of respect left for them in the game.