Fireworks, Two Up Front & A Dose Of Reality

(Before we go on; the supporters club banner that appears in the photo is that of the Glenacre, who’s members were in no way involved in Sunday’s incident. Aside from my knowing them all well, they’ve issued a statement on their Facebook page making that 100% clear.)

Well Sunday was interesting, wasn’t it?

See how different the team looks with two up front?

How much more dangerous?

How much space Leigh Griffiths was able to find off the ball, when the Stranraer players were focussed on the physical threat of big Carlton Cole?

Was it a perfect performance? No, of course not.

That’s as much due to the opposition strangling the game by packing the penalty area as it was about anything else, that and the fact our players didn’t have to get out of second gear most of the day.

But it was good to see nonetheless.

I want to talk about Leigh first, before moving on to other stuff.

The way he took his goals was just superb.

Every regular reader knows how I feel about Leigh – he’s on course for getting onto our 100 Goals list and will blow past that milestone and head right for the next one – but even I’ve been impressed these last few months at the way he’s grown as a player and as a person, and is becoming the indispensable footballer at the club.

In a way that concerns me.

No club should be over-dependent on one footballer, but it’s good that we have a player who stands out and who can be relied on to produce the goods week in week out like he does.

It was clear that Stranraer set up their tactics to keep him out of the game, but Ronny surprised them with his decision to start Cole too.

Cole roughed them up.

He provided a physical presence they had no choice but to try and counter, and he was lively, as you’d expect from someone who hasn’t started a match in a while and wanted to make a point.

Like, for example, to the idiotic Sunday Mail hack who wrote a scandalous article on him and Nadir Ciftci which wasn’t so much a football opinion piece as it was a gutter-level character assassination that ought never to have seen the light of day.

The match was marred, as so many have been in recent years, by the behaviour of a small number of fans who simply refuse to get with the program on pyrotechnics.

This isn’t political songs, which I’ll defend to the absolute end on free speech grounds; this has health and safety repercussions which makes this behaviour moronic and ignorant at best at worst is criminally dangerous and ought to see those responsible drummed out of football stadia permanently … and Celtic are, today, taking steps to at least make sure they don’t attend our games.

Young kids go these matches.

We have fans with asthma and other health conditions who’s issues are plainly ignored by these idiots.

One other thing; the press is having a field day, and coming on the heels of the Sevco fans deplorable behaviour against Hibs this was the belated Christmas present they were waiting for. There’s even one hack speculating that “offensive signing” might be reported to the SFA delegate as well – an absolutely barking charge, but you can tell he was offended anyway – and you can just picture him scrutinising every piece of YouTube footage right now, can’t you?

The media lives for this stuff, and I don’t mean the songs.

I don’t give a damn what they think of our so-called “offensive songs”, because if we start with criminalising offending people The Daily Record itself would be banned and all its journalists jailed on account of their conduct in so many areas of our national life.

This stuff with the flares gives them an easy target, and our club is sick to the back teeth of it as well, which only seems to encourage the yahoos who do it.

They want to take a look at the internet today; when it’s not websites from their own side condemning them it’s the media, lapping it up like Pavlov’s slobbering dogs.

They ought to take the hint … not that it will matter.

Because according to a statement just released the club has identified three of them and they’re looking at indefinite bans from our games.

Not before time.

One last thing on the subject; Police Scotland, who did the sum total of nil at Ibrox and who, in the aftermath, have yet to utter a word about the conduct of Sevco fans, couldn’t wait to jump into this either. Their statement today, issued by the “match commander” is ridiculous in light of their total silence on that matter.

The statement itself, I have no issue with … except that it contains one outright falsehood; that the Celtic fans engaged in “sectarian singing.”

He needs to check the definition of that as it appears in the dictionary.

Political singing, yes, but it’s been nearly 20 years since I heard an overtly sectarian song from Celtic fans at a game.

I’ll make this public challenge to Superintendent Steven Lowther; if he can name me just one instance of Celtic fans singing “sectarian songs” at the weekend then I’ll tell you what … I’ll shut this website down, and I’ll volunteer as an unpaid intern at Police Scotland’s media office for the next six months.

Which brings me to John Collins, who also needs to look at the Celtic sites and take the hint.

Over the weekend he displayed some ignorance and stupidity of his own when, at a press event, he attempted to speak for the Celtic support (or those of us he classed as “living in the real world” anyway) when he said the whole club wants to see a club called Rangers playing in the Premier League next season.

Now I understand he was ambushed with the question.

I also understand that the nature of the question itself – “Would Celtic get more credit for winning the league if Sevco were in the top flight?” – is, in itself, a disgrace … but I can’t believe he accepted the premise of it, before giving an answer that was part presumptive and part deflection for bad performances.

If he really believes we need a club called Sevco in the league to “spark” the team into playing good football then I’d suggest he’s in the wrong job, at the wrong club.

For a start, it’s scandalous to suggest that the team lacks motivation because of that, and I don’t want someone who thinks that way at Celtic Park in any capacity.

It’s also a perpetuation of this insulting notion that, somehow, our national sport is missing out on something by not having the Ibrox NewCo in the top flight.

Let’s be blunt; they are a shambles at the moment, with their short term loans just to keep on the lights, and this month’s flurry of signings – lower league English players, most of them young and unproven – aren’t going to alter that fact one iota.

This financial basket case continues to be an embarrassment to itself.

For all its big talk they’re going precisely nowhere.

The smarter Sevco fans, who had been promised, and were expecting, the arrival of big names won’t be fobbed off by this Football Manager Lower League Manager’s Challenge type scouting … although the media clearly are.

If they get to the top flight at all – and they’re still facing a battle to accomplish that – they’ll be no better than a mid-table battler right now.

The idea that we’ll somehow be “looking for their scores” in the way we currently chortle over the mishaps of Aberdeen … well, they’ll need to be challenging us before that will happen.

They have no “divine right” to be considered the second biggest team in the country.

What Collins and those like him who constantly push this lie – and I have no trouble at all calling it exactly that – will have to get into their heads is that the “Old Firm” is dead and gone, and the Celtic fans have always loathed that particular tag anyway.

The bulk of us don’t care if a club calling itself Sevco is in the league or not.

The media talks about credit as if we don’t have to beat anyone most weeks; the three points just automatically accrue without any effort on our part.

It’s funny how, in the years of Rangers nine in a row when we were impoverished and they riding high on bank debt that no-one ever questioned their titles, or refused to give them credit. It’s pathetic to me that anyone inside Celtic Park cares what “credit” we get from people who despise us.

We’re also not terribly keen to be shoved into a phony “rivalry” built on the unhealthiest foundations, and which helps to stoke hate.

On a weekend where we should be focussed on what happened on the park, these are the issues we’re discussing.

Self-inflicted wounds and the behaviour of clowns.

But on the park … no complaints.

Two up front … that’s the way to do it Celtic.