Hate is an emotion I don’t like to feel, but there are certain sections of humanity – or which masquerade under that banner – which I can’t muster anything else for.
The Haters.
Those who wade in that emotion, who wrap it around themselves like a comfort blanket, as a salve against their own inadequacies and fears. It is spawned from ignorance; that hardly needs pointing out, but it is self-sustaining. And it spreads, like a virus.
The virus metaphor is a good one, because hate mutates like a virus too. Nowhere in Scotland is this clearer than in a section of the Ibrox support, and at Pittodrie yesterday they were out in force, and wallowing in it deeper than ever.
The picture of broken seats is shocking enough, but the entire songbook came out again in all of its horror. This is a support that has evolved over time in a direction Darwin never expected.
Humanity came up from the primordial ooze. That large, vocal, and always busy section of their fan-base is progressing back in that direction.
They even appear to be proud of it.
Over the years, their fans have shifted the way they manifest their hate very subtly, but always pointing downward, heading for the sewer. They went from the dirge of the Billy Boys to a loathsome fixation with Jock Stein – which persists to this day, a hatred that runs deep but is especially toxic as it pumped full of unrealised ambition and lethal jealousy – to the disgusting, racist, Famine Song and, lately, to a new one about hating Catholics.
Imagine this; a club who’s very own manager is a Catholic.
I hate these people and I feel no sense of shame in admitting that fact, because they bask in that emotion, and so I hate them with good reason. I hail from Irish Catholic stock; that me and mine they are singing about, whether in the Vomitorium of Ibrox or in the dusty stands of other SPL grounds.
These people are retrograde scum, and they’ve only been able to thrive as they have – and they are thriving; there are more of them in the stands than at any other time in my living memory, and their steady creep of influence into the supporters groups is deadly– is because they’ve been shielded and protected for years beyond count.
By the media, and by the club itself.
When one of the board members can hail sectarian singing in the presence of a journalist, and spout the most bigoted sentiments to the cameras, there are problems that won’t be fixed simply by hosing out the stands. That whole club has issues with this stuff, it permeates every facet of its being.
When you hear talk that what the club requires on the coaching staff – above actual coaching skills – is “Real Rangers Men” who “understand the culture” this is what they are talking about; anti-Catholic, anti-Irish, white Protestant supremacist guff.
Even Warburton would have had to put up with this; he came as a package with David Weir, otherwise he would have had to consider a “local assistant.” Caixinha is a Portuguese, and not of their preferred religious and cultural persuasion; there is no way he wasn’t going to be required to put a “Real Rangers Man” on the team.
Good for him that he’s gone with Jonathon Johansen, who spent time at the club but wasn’t swallowed up in this garbage. It’s a clean break from some of the gutter dwellers who were amongst the favourites, our pal “Der Bomber” being the most overtly lunatic.
What must this guy think, standing in the dugout, hearing these morons piping up behind him? Will he turn to Johansen at one point and ask “Is that me they are singing about?” I can only conclude that his Scandinavian colleague will have to lie.
The rest of us are long since passed being sick of this mob. Aberdeen will send them a bill for the seats their degenerate fans broke yesterday. They can stick the invoice beside the one we sent them, and which they wouldn’t have voluntarily paid. The media’s behaviour over that was appalling; when we decided to with-hold ticket money from them because they’d refused to pay we were accused of stoking tensions. Unbelievable.
It’s time they were called out, and by everyone. Their club could be doing much more; as it is right now they are doing exactly nothing. Talk of introducing Strict Liability is a nonsense because there are already rules in place which could punish the club for the way these reprobates behave, but they are never enforced. The get-out clause is that if clubs can demonstrate that they’ve made every possible effort to combat bad behaviour in the stands they get off … by that token Sevco should find it very easy to do that, if they ban those fans responsible for the latest acts of destruction at Aberdeen. I suspect they’ll not bother though.
Did they do it when the Celtic toilets were vandalised?
No. In spite of video footage clearly showing numerous individuals doing just that, they refused to pay.
In the aftermath of the Scottish Cup Final last season they threw allegations here, there and everywhere – as they did after the debacle at Celtic Park – and praised the behaviour of the nutjobs who ran onto the pitch for a square-go. I said at the time their comments made it abundently clear that they were encouraging bad behaviour rather than tackling it, by ascribing some warped – and wholly false – justification for it. The SFA should have disciplined them for bringing the game into disrepute.
The behaviour of these people, these louts, these thugs, makes the club very easy to hate.
They ascribe that emotion to “jealousy of their history.” Well, even if it was their history, and not that of a dead club they claim to have purchased, off a shelf, like a fajita kit, they’ve long ignored the fact that long periods of it are shrouded in scandal.
When they talk about how all of Scottish football is out to get them it is paranoid nonsense, but it’s not without a kernel of truth.
This would be why.
When you attend someone’s house and fill the place with sectarian bile and wreck the living room on your way out, why should anyone be in a hurry to welcome you back or wish you well for the future?
Their club is imperilled by these people. Because right now it’s running on empty, and the time is coming when it will require the “understanding” and “compassion” of other clubs and the tolerance of other fans, when they try to cut the next deal with the governing bodies. They won’t get it, because on top of their wounds being entirely self-inflicted there is this, this disgusting section of their fan base which simply refuses to join the civilised world.
The rest of us might be sick of them, but Sevco is sick with them, and like the most virulent, dread, diseases, this one is fatal and it’s cure or die.
They appear not to want to get better.
That leaves only the other option.
No-one will mourn them.