Yesterday at Ibrox the Peepul were at their running worst.
The sectarian songbook was wiped down and lips parted and throats opened to spew hatred like a drunk vomiting into the gutter outside a pub. Objects were thrown at our players. Racism reared its ugly, ignorant head. One overweight eejit got onto the pitch to have a go at our captain.
The atmosphere was as poisonous as it’s ever been.
Our success has hit this mob hard.
Their delusional existence has been shattered by it, and by a season of trauma which would never have hit them so hard if they weren’t suffering the world’s most ridiculous superiority complex. There is simply no talking these people down off the ledge and I’m no longer willing to try. If they want to believe this club is still Rangers, and all the while ignoring what Rangers really was, then I think they should be left to it.
Days like yesterday will continue to come, and continue to hurt.
That’s up to them.
But in the meantime, Scottish football should not have to suffer along with them.
Let them splash about in their cesspit as they like, but from now on whenever they decide to share with us their warped world view someone should hold them to account for it.
I am against Strict Liability; I can only guess at the form it would take and the people who would police it. The sort of illiberal morons who tell themselves and the world how open minded and tolerant they are, as long as the opinion you are expressing is one with which they agree. I am tired of these hectoring halfwits looking down their noses at the rest of us, from whatever pedestal they think they are entitled to climb onto.
I am a free speech advocate.
I don’t believe some of these people know what the term means, or if they do they choose to ignore it whenever it suits them.
But what Celtic’s players and fans had to endure yesterday was not free speech but hate speech, and we didn’t need to pass laws against that because laws already exist – and have existed for a long time – to deal with it. Sevco can preach the choir of “we do all we can and we abhor racism, sectarianism, etc” until they are bluer in the face but none of us is buying it any longer. The hatred in the stands has roots in the boardroom. The supporter’s organisations are filled to their executive rooms with people in full sympathy with the sectarianism that wafts from those stands sometimes like a rotten fish.
One look at their forums today is to enough to familiarise yourself with the reek of madness, paranoia and bigotry that runs through their support like the blood in the veins. Forget the “small minority” shit these people frequently hit you with; this is thousands, tens of thousands, we’re talking about here. If it is a minority – and I have trouble believing that – then it is a large one, and it likes to make itself heard and seen.
The club’s claim to be doing all it can is a tissue of lies, a thin tissue at that. It is not designed to fool people either, only to give feeble cover to feeble administrators who would rather this went on and on and on and on, unacknowledged, than face it and deal with it. Rules already exist. They are being pissed all over by the Ibrox club. No wonder some of our political class – always ready to aim a kick at football fans – wants to take it out of their hands.
And those people will have their way unless football acts first.
As opposed to it as I am, there are days – and this is one them – when you could sell Strict Liability to me without the need for a brown paper bag, and if that’s what it’s got to be, then why are we putting off the day of destiny one minute longer?
Make the rules robust, but clearly define what is and what isn’t allowed.
Pyrotechnics will vanish from the stands pronto when clubs are being punished for their use. We all know that. Certain songs would have to be weeded out, and I don’t mean the Irish stuff, which upsets some people but hard lines. Ban that and they better ban national anthems too, and poppies.
But yesterday, in the Kerrydale Suite, there were a group of yahoos singing Roamin’ In The Gloamin’. If that song was never heard at Celtic Park again it would be too soon … it belongs in the bin, as a piece of utter twattery with no connection to our football club at all. And if you want to sing Republic tunes then do it, but do it right. To the best of my knowledge Celtic did not give us James McGrory and Paul McStay “… and the IRA” and any halfwit who believes those words belong in a song about our best footballers needs a swift re-education and I’m not particularly bothered if it involves a quick journey down a long flight of stairs.
That aside, I think we’d have nothing to fear, nothing whatsoever, from having Strict Liability written into the SPL rules, as long as the lines were clear.
Everyone knows what those lines are and Sevco crossed them all yesterday, with the abandon of people who know there will be no accounting for any of it.
We know what sectarianism is.
We know what racism is.
We know fans throwing objects at footballers is a dire issue for which heavy penalties should be handed out.
And invading the park … if it takes forcing clubs to play matches behind closed doors then so be it.
Let them wail about the financial cost all they like; it’s a small price to pay for stamping that particular issue out once and for all.
And tell me something; how does a guy like that get on the park in the first place?
This had High Risk Fixture written all over it; I wrote on Friday morning that the reaction, on Sevco forums, to the Scott Brown appeal was hysterical verging on dangerous. You only had to spend five minutes on there to see that for yourself.
How does a scumbag get so close to him, and how is it that it took the players and the referee to intervene before stewards and police got there?
Is Ibrox already doing this “volunteer steward” nonsense?
Did that impact on the reaction time?
If that guy had a little more bottle – or if he’d supplemented his Dutch courage with a blade – we might be writing about the darkest day in the history of the game here.
Something needs to be done about that.
The SFA is going to hide behind existing regulations and this garbage they always do, but I tell you, the clubs are mugs for allowing this for one minute longer.
With the way things stand between Hearts and Hibs, between Hibs and Sevco, between Sevco and Aberdeen and, of course, with us and the derelict NewCo the level of aggression and hate is going to be even higher next season than in this one.
How long before we are writing about one of those days?
Back in the heyday of the Ibrox operation, when they were financially doped to the gills enough that they could get to strut their stuff on the big stages of European football, there was a spell when the scandalous behaviour of their supporters had me seriously concerned that before long it was going to end in a Leeds United style situation where people were going to die. Manchester must have come perilously close to fulfilling that dark prediction.
For a while their supporters got their act together sufficiently that that was no longer a major concern, when UEFA sanctions started to threaten their bottom line. All that ugliness is back, with a more vicious slant than ever, and yesterday showed the need for it to be tackled and the people involved in it banished from the stands.
Their wider support is in no mood to weed these people out; indeed their forums have expressed regret only insomuch as the guy who ran onto the pitch didn’t give Brown a dig before the cops dragged him away.
The sectarian singing is something they’re proud of; a thread by a guy who wants their new anti-Catholic anthem removed from the stands resulted in vitriol directed against him and his family – he dared to marry a Catholic, and said so, and if you think the song itself is sick you want to read some of the comments that generated.
I am sick of these people, thoroughly completely sick of them.
This is the second week in a row where I’ve had to devote an entire article to their disgraceful behaviour and unless our game has the courage to rid itself of them once and for all it will not be the last time I do. If it doesn’t then the politicians will, and their version will dwarf whatever the clubs themselves decide to do.
How much is too much?
How far is too far?
When does the SFA start to represent the interests of the game instead of pandering and fawning and scraping?
Is it really going to take a player or manager in a stretcher or rival fans in the ground?
Jesus Christ, for all our sport has come through, do you really believe it could survive that?
That it could come back from that?
This will involve soul searching, and even some compromise even on the part of our own fans.
It will necessitate a whole lot of growing the Hell up.
We are not the problem, but the problem won’t be tackled under the current regulations, or until those are amended accordingly.
Something has to be done.
It cannot go on like this.