Last night, shortly before the match kicked off, Scotland’s favourite brand of decorative bog roll was clogging up the internet with its usual anti-Celtic spiel. They did, of course, choose to feature the Palestinian flags in the stadium, almost urging UEFA to open an immediate investigation (remember, this is before the game had started) but it was another of their stories that niggled at me all night long and still niggles at me this morning.
They ran a story with the following headline;
“Watch as thugs – some wearing Rangers tops and others supporting Palestine – fight in Glasgow city centre.”
And this was their sub-heading.
“Shocking footage has emerged showing thugs – some wearing Rangers tops and some who are supporters of the Palestinian cause – battling in Glasgow city centre today …”
They included the video.
Yet what it shows is somewhat different to the headline, and to that paragraph, which suggests that two sides confronted each other with mutual animosity on their minds. That video actually shows scum in Sevco shirts attacking a guy who walked out of the train station for no other reason than his football and political allegiances, and said guy defending himself.
This is victim blaming, which is a favourite sport of The Record when the perpetrators are wearing the favoured shirt of their target audience.
After all, this is the same newspaper that still blames the rest of Scottish football for Rangers collapse after they’d systemically cheated the rest of us for near on 15 years. This is the paper that slandered the entire Hibs support after the Scottish Cup Final and didn’t so much make excuses for Sevco fans but helped create the work of fiction that club still puts forward as their “official” version of events.
The video clearly shows the guy hitting the blue shirted yahoos, but I’m not entirely sure what the hack who wrote this (another of those nameless wonders, who hides behind the anonymous “By Record Reporter” by-line) thought the guy should have done. I am going to assume said reporter has never been in a street fight involving a gang;  as someone who has I can tell him you don’t piss about unless you want seven shades kicked out of you. So he got stuck in there. It’s the textbook definition of “acting in self defence.” The guy in question isn’t a yob because he got the best of them … they were clearly pumped up jokers who thought there was safety in numbers.
The hack goes on to write that “tensions were raised in the city ahead of the match – which Celtic won 5-2 – with pro-Palestinian protesters holding a demonstration outside Celtic Park before the game …” once again, seeking to put the blame where it doesn’t belong.
Let me tell you what else that video reveals; that a number of loons were out and about in town, flying their colours, looking for a fight. That was by no means an isolated incident. It was yet another explosion of rabid thuggery from people whose burning inferiority complex continually gets the better of them, as we all saw on Cup Final Day.
Someone suggested to me last night that these clowns might have been on their way to their team’s own Irn Bru League Cup match, where their wonder-kids (they finished 13th in the Development League last year) were eventually beaten 3-1 by Stenhousemuir, but I’m not buying that.
The match was in Stirling; that’s Queen Street Station, not Central, and the attendance was a mere 324.
This was a roving ambush party who simply picked the wrong guy in typical, brainless, Sevco style.
Their behaviour is bad enough … but the victim blaming from that paper is worse.
In Brendan We Trust.
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