Congratulations to the idiot who let off a flare on public transport in Manchester.
You really are a halfwit. Not only was it an extraordinarily reckless, stupid thing to have done – and I hope you’re caught, prosecuted and banned from football for life – but it gave our media the wet-dream they were looking for. You bloody eejit.
But to the hacks themselves, well we owe you nothing but contempt.
Trouble in Manchester eah? That must have been heavy for MGN Limited’s titles to be reporting on it in the way they have. It must have been severe, and unequivocal otherwise they’d be playing it down or blaming it fans from English clubs. Because I seem to remember other incidents in Manchester getting exactly that treatment, in a typically gutless exercise in damage limitation.
But I suppose that depends on who you are limiting the damage to.
4000 Celtic fans in town for the game. One threw a hamburger at a horse, as gleefully reported by Glasgow Live, a website that’s getting itself quite the reputation for writing guff and making up stories. Oh I have no-one doubt the burger story is true, but it’s a single moron doing something plain dumb.
It’s not fighting a running battle with police.
As for the un-named “witness” in the Record’s piece of excreta on the flare – although it sounds more like it was a smoke bomb; no excuses either way – and his vivid description of “terrified members of the public” … excuse me if I say “Bullshit.”
Manchester is a football city. It hosts two enormous teams.
Is the writer really expecting us to believe that it’s the first time these people have ever encountered fans before? The incident described – a large number of supporters getting on and making some noise – happens every single week in the city … this is such obvious cobblers, such a clear-cut attempt at smearing the Celtic fans, that it would be ridiculous if it went unanswered.
I’ve said this often enough on here; it only takes a couple of clowns in our support to give these people license to paint the whole lot of us whichever way they want, and they enjoy doing it.
This was a wet dream for the hacks after a game in which we acquitted ourselves splendidly on the park and off the park showed the home crowd (were there home fans inside the stadium? I didn’t hear any) how real fans make an atmosphere.
But a few relatively minor incidents has the whole media in a paroxysm of bed wetting today in an effort to cast a shadow over the game itself and the way this team of ours is developing.
Whilst two individuals have behaved stupidly – one epically so – the over-reaction is exactly what you would expect from gutter hacks who hate our guts, and a media group that’s output is designed to appeal to a very different demographic than ours.
Honestly, this is not unexpected. A national news title trawling the Twitter feed of Greater Manchester Police in the hope of writing a negative story or two … our club needs to think long and hard about banning this particular media organisation from our ground.
If Sevco can ban the national broadcaster without missing a beat then I really don’t know what we’re waiting for.