SFA compliance officer Vincent Lunny speaks about journey from killing fields to football fields One story which sticks in my mind bizarrely is from another case in Kosovo against the Prime Minister, Ramush Haradinaj. Basically they'd taken someone and wrapped him in barbed wire, tied him behind a car and dragged him for two or three miles. All the body parts were found along the road. When the UN came to exhume the grave years later they found around 50 bodies in a canal and one of the skeletons was still wrapped in the barbed wire. Right away, out of all those bodies, they knew who that one person was - someone with a family, a background and a life. To move from that via a spell as a procurator fiscal at Glasgow Sheriff Court (the busiest in Europe) to the petty tribalism of football - especially the West of Scotland variety - certainly seems to require a reduction in gravity. Lunny, though, perceives a continuity which began with a conversation he had with a senior procurator in Glasgow prior to his becoming a fiscal. The guy who later became my boss told me that I'd deal with cases which would cover a wide spectrum. It could be a murder right down to someone urinating in the street," said Lunny. Urinating in the street isn't the most important crime in the world but if it's on your doorstep or your garden - and you're the victim - then it's the most important thing to you at that particular time. That stuck with me all the way through the fiscal service. You have a really wide range of cases. Now, dealing with this job at the SFA, it's important for the player involved, the club and the fans so it's got to be treated with an importance. That's what I'm doing each time, that's my job, and there's a satisfaction in doing it properly, being impartial, treating every case the same through the same process. Everyone goes on about the war crimes and there's an interest in that and it's been a great experience for me. But after being a fiscal in Glasgow for four years and 10 years in the service overall the process and the ethos of being fair and impartial is what counts. Impartiality is a particularly thorny topic whenever the Old Firm clubs encounter officialdom and he had scarcely sat at his desk at Hampden before the fact that he attended a Roman Catholic school in Lanarkshire was proclaimed on a Rangers supporters" website. "It's a great place to work with great people but it's the west of Scotland," said Lunny. I'd been away from the country for the best part of five years and coming back here I knew it was going to happen but it didn't put me off. To be offered a job which is both prosecution and sport at the same time is something I couldn't turn down. When Sone Aluko of Rangers was cited for simulation against Dunfermline - a charge the player contested but which was rejected by the SFA's fast-track tribunal - the familiar objection was levelled that Lunny had not played professional football. There have also been criticisms that players are cited depending on the "inclination of TV producers" to linger on incidents. Lunny's rebuttal is succinct. I understand where Sone Aluko was coming from. I never had to be a criminal to be a fiscal - I have never played the game at club level but I can apply the laws of the game using professional advice. In fact, the majority of cases are not football cases on the field. There are registration infringements and paper trails - where not being a footballer is an advantage. Under the rules an incident can be brought to my attention by any means. The disciplinary unit will receive referee reports on a spreadsheet after every single game. After the SPL the Highland League is our second biggest customer so to speak. They are referred to me on Monday and Tuesday morning and are generally the non fast-track cases. The majority of them are usually non-team staff matters. It is a problem in some of the lower leagues when referees are giving up some of their spare time and being abused. "They might say, "To hell with this, why am I giving up my Saturday to put up with this carry on?" That's a large part of my work because you don't want to see people leaving the game. Has he, having never played professional football, instigated referrals himself? "There have been two cases when I have seen things, while looking at other things, and thought, "Why is nothing happening about that?" I've gone to the referee department and both of those instances were processed but only after taking professional football advice from John Fleming [the SFA head of referee development]. Having kept his head down until now, Lunny has largely avoided involuntary contact with fans who hold pungent views about the treatment of their team's players. Perhaps surprisingly, it was not a feature of his previous employment. "In the criminal world there is a code of honour and they realise you are just doing your job," said Lunny. I've been shouted at once in the street as a fiscal and that was the last week of my job. It was outside Hamilton Sheriff Court when a woman drove by and shouted at me that I was a ------. Since I've been here I've had one handwritten letter from a fan accusing me of being one-sided. I still have that letter at home and I'm going to frame it - because this fan was keen to point out that he was not in any way a bigamist.