Peter Lawwell today re-iterated the short, classy statement Celtic gave to Sky last night, in the aftermath of the frothing mad one that came out of Ibrox. In an interview with TalkSport this morning, he was inevitably asked about those comments and what went on in one small part of the Celtic stands. He kept it brief, and neat.
“What we won’t do is get involved in a public spat or tit for tat,” he said, making it clear, I think, that if he’d wanted to he could have levelled some accusations of his own.
Celtic needn’t do that.
That’s a job for guys like me, and I’ll take great satisfaction from going over that particular ground later on.
“We’ll try to operate to the highest possible standards – as we always do in a private and professional manner – and if there is anyone found behaving in a manner we don’t like then we will take the action,” he said. “But we don’t want to sensationalise this. We want to put it into context. There were millions of Celtic fans around the world with an overwhelming positivity, an overwhelming proportion of supporters in the stadium who gave us huge positive support. We shouldn’t take it out of context, we should take it seriously and in the manner we always do.”
That wraps up Celtic’s response in a bow.
There’s no need for the club to utter one more word about this stuff. Sevco can be as outraged as it likes, and “consult” with the demented element of its own support as it wishes to, but this matter is closed, and in a way that should leave no doubt whatsoever of where we stand on this.
Celtic does things quietly, calmly and with great clarity and purpose. I cannot imagine our great and proud club acting with such little class and dignity as the other lot showed last night, behaving like paranoid hysterics utterly blind to their own hypocrisy.
I heard late last night that Sevco’s nutcase element were petitioning Celtic’s sponsors to drop the club after the weekend. That’s one way to try and claw back the financial deficit, I suppose, but I have little doubt no-one’s going to be taking their call or answering their ranting, deluded emails.
As I predicted to some friends last night, between some of the blogs getting in front of this and condemning the tasteless nature of this stunt and the club’s rational, considered, measured response this thing’s been dealt with and put to bed rather nicely.
There’s nowhere left for the story to go, unless the Ibrox unintelligentsia want to keep embarrassing themselves.
The press got a one day story out of it. Celtic has denied them a second.
Their carnival will swiftly move on, no matter how much they wish it didn’t have to.
At the end of the day, it was a handful of people at most. As somebody posted on CQN last night this is the very definition of a “small minority of fans”, a phrase that in Scotland has come to mean many thousands of people singing about being up to their knees in blood.
We all know what this is about, of course; their phony outrage (unlike the very real anger a lot of Celtic fans felt) is wholly about deflection and covering for their own inadequacies. This is what happens when an institution is dying on its arse; think of this through the prism of the Kübler-Ross grief model; we’ve had denial. Now we’re on anger.
I have a feeling it’s only just getting started.
In the meantime, as they continue to wail and scream and scratch at the rest of the world, behaving like an immature teenager who isn’t getting an Xbox One for his birthday Celtic continues to do its thing as it always has; like a responsible, grown up, forward thinking organisation should.
The contrast couldn’t be greater, could it?