Celtic Fans Go Where The Hacks Fear To Tread

Today the widely trailed full page ad from the Celtic fans appeared in The Sunday Herald, and as was entirely predictable it has everyone talking.

On our sister site, On Fields of Green, I have written a lengthy defence of the ad and laid out the reasons for it, and a link to that is available at the bottom of this piece, but for now I want to focus on the reaction the ad is getting, from one particular quarter.

I refer, of course, to the reaction from the hack-pack, with some of their journalists fishing for dissenting voices amidst the Celtic support, in an effort to claim the ad doesn’t have widespread support, whilst others are making spurious suggestions about where the money might better have been spent.

Let me say, first, that not every Celtic supporter will agree, or does agree, that this ad was necessary or that it will do some good, so I can save the hacks a lot of time on that one.

The Celtic Family is a broad church with a wide range of opinions. Some Celtic fans – a small number of them – do, sadly, remain wedded to the “Old Firm” fantasy, and others will say this article un-necessarily heightens tensions on the eve of an edgy encounter.

There’s no arguing with the first group, and I won’t even try. To the second I would say only this; it is the media, and those who are trying to package this as an “Old Firm” game who are ratcheting those tensions up. If you accept that the club Celtic plays next week is Rangers, then you are, by default, accepting the narrative of their supporters wherein they were the victims of a witch hunt.

That view is the source of all the anger swirling around this fixture.

Where, then, can there be any harm in Celtic fans making a statement which calls for a different approach to how this game is viewed?

The hacks can look for “evidence” of a split in the Celtic Family all they like, but theirs is an exercise in futility because on the subject of the “Old Firm” there is virtually no dissent, save for that small number of holdouts. Celtic fans, in the main, abhor the tag, and the vast majority of us are in no doubt that Sevco Rangers is a brand new football club.

The number of “journalists” who’s columns, today, are desperate efforts to raise the dead makes the media in this country look spineless at best and at worst bought and paid for, their opinions nothing more than regurgitated PR spin.

Take Andrew Smith, in The Scotsman, who used his column to talk up a fixture that is no more, and demand that Celtic fans accept that “there is a Rangers”, and accused of us of refusing to live with the truth.

He has to be joking.

His entire piece, but for one paragraph, where he actually accepted the very premise of our case – that the club died – only to make a convoluted attempt at resurrecting it a moment later, was a distortion of reality so profound I would swear he wrote it from the other side of the wardrobe to Narnia.

To continue living in the realms of fantasy, by insisting that football clubs can’t die, that they are ephemeral entities separate from the companies that pay their bills and hold their contracts and own their stadiums and market their jerseys … that is truly barmy. Smith appears to agree with that view … before veering back into the delusion again.

His trouble is that he tries to square the circle, and ties himself in knots as is inevitable when you’re trying to do the impossible.

I agree with Smith on only one thing; there is “a Rangers.” But it is not the same Rangers. It is a newco with the same blue strip on it, playing out of the same ground, supported by the same fans. His claim that this is still the same club flounders on the wave of the truth he already accepts.

Because if your family pet died and you put its collar on a new animal it wouldn’t change the simple truth that somewhere outside the first animal is lying in a shallow grave, rotting in wormy earth.

His problem, a problem shared by the governing bodies and the Sevco supporters, is that Celtic fans have a wholly consistent view whereas theirs is all over the map.

Matthew Lindsay’s comments on Twitter plumbed the gutter.

His offensive suggestion that Celtic fans should have spent their money on a donation to charity sound like bitter, acid dripping resentment that his own newspaper has been forced to confront a truth he and others would rather not have acknowledged.

Lindsay, as ignorant as he must be of what goes on with the Celtic support, is clearly unaware of the vast sums of money the club’s fans raise every year for charitable purposes.

He is clearly equally ignorant of the fact that this ad was “crowd funded” and that the overage is being spent on exactly those charitable causes.

The idea of accepting moral advice from the same people pushing the Survival Myth, and thereby excusing the dumping of debts running into the tens of millions of pounds, would be sickening if I didn’t suspect deep down that it was some kind of ironic joke.

Today’s media reaction, where they’re pushing the “Old Firm” line harder than ever before betrays the truly lamentable dearth of courage and conviction within the mainstream press.

Whether it’s an editorial policy designed not to upset certain readers or the bias of individual journalists that causes this I care not one jot. They are an embarrassment to their profession.

Some have asked, sarcastically, what the purpose of this was.

I see where this confuses them.

The purpose is to put the truth in front of as wide an audience as possible. No-one is under any illusions about changing a single mind. Fantasists persist in their fantasies no matter what you say to them. The lunatic asylums never have empty wards.

This ad is about promoting the truth. Nothing else. It’s about getting the facts across.

You know … like journalism is supposed to.

Why did the Celtic fans do it? Because otherwise no-one would.

That ought to embarrass these people, and you can tell by some of their reactions that, for the more grounded amongst them, who know what their occupation has become, that it does.

Our “journalistic class” ought to be thoroughly ashamed today.

Their profession has been shown up in its own living room.

I can see why some of them aren’t happy about that.

You can read the piece from On Fields of Green by clicking here.