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As More Doubts Surface Over Ibrox, Our Club Must Seek Clarity Or Not Accept Tickets For The Ground

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Phil McGiollabhain has, tonight, published an astonishing, and troubling, article on the deteriorating state of Ibrox Stadium. So alarming is this report that it asks serious questions of a number of agencies other than Sevco; one of them is our own club.

You can read that article clicking here.

According to Phil’s article, the roofs at the ground are in such perilous condition that their club will install “safety nets” in January, so that supporters are not at risk from debris falling from them. This begs an obvious question, which Phil has also asked; what about fans who attend games there prior to the installation of these nets?

The idea of installing nets is scandalous and ridiculous in and of itself. That can’t possibly guarantee supporter safety; the very idea suggests that there are appalling structural issues with those stands and this reeks of a stop-gap measure designed only to do the minimum required to satisfy a local authority that doesn’t want the responsibility for shutting the ground.

For the moment I am less concerned with that than I am about what our own club intends to do about it. If they are familiar with this story, and it has any truth to it – and Phil’s article is convincing, and certainly not sensationalist in any way – then our club has a duty of care to our own fans to ask for answers. If those nets are going up, then our supporters are at risk in the meantime. Our club should refund any fans who have bought tickets and tell Sevco we don’t want them.

This will inconvenience us and it will deprive our team of support in that ground on the day, but I do not know one supporter who would gamble with his or her life, or that of a loved one, on the off-chance that Phil or his sources have this wrong.

I know our club doesn’t like to interfere in the internal affairs of another Scottish club, but if this was a European away tie and there were issues like this I know Peter Lawwell would be on top of it, and asking for answers.

And in the final extreme, I know he’s be asking for an inquiry and telling our supporters not to attend the match in the meantime. For the sake of fan safety, we wouldn’t touch tickets for the game and this ought to be handled in exactly the same way.

As Phil says, this is not about point scoring. People’s lives may be at risk here; it doesn’t get more serious than that. We’ve all heard stories about the ground and, as his article reminds us there was a well publicised incident not that long ago when fans inside the stadium had to be moved due to a structural problem.

Safety nets suggest something that’s got worse, not better.

Everyone should be contacting Celtic, via the Supporter Liaison Officer, and asking for a comment on whether we believe Ibrox is a safe environment for fans. Nothing less than an unequivocal statement, one way or the other, will do. If the ground is safe, then all well and good. If there is the slightest doubt our supporters need to know.

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