How many different ways do the governing bodies need to remind us that they think of as something Lesser?
That we are barely tolerated, here in our own country?
We can go abroad and be made welcome, we can fill every part of the Allianz Arena and get kudos from club and police, and we can leave behind us friends and good memories … and here in Scotland we get pissed on from a great height.
How much more obvious does it need to be?
Today at Hampden there will be many thousands of empty seats, because the SPFL won’t release them to our club. Hibs demanded, and got, a 50-50 split and could not sell the tickets. But they reserved the right to keep those they didn’t sell, instead of giving them to our supporters. The farce will be complete tomorrow when Motherwell takes the field at a Sevco home match at Hampden in front of a crowd where their fans are outnumbered five or six to one.
They and the SPFL have turned it into a home game for the Ibrox club.
I have no issue with what Hibs have done, I want to be clear on that right now.
They asked for 50% of the tickets and got them, and they’ve decided that in spite of not selling their own share they are not going to give them to our club to let us likewise turn it into a home tie. Understandable. My issue is with the governing body that allowed any of this.
When they allowed Sevco fans to dominate Hampden for the Motherwell game that obliterated this garbage about 50-50 splits.
If Motherwell make the final they dare not make any such demand; it should be laughed out of the room.
Celtic is right to complain about this; Aberdeen did the exact same thing to us for the cup final last year. They demanded half the tickets and then sold half of them, and this after Celtic fans groups and blogs (including this one) pointed out that they don’t even fill their own ground every week. There is a disconnect in the way these things are done. There is an inconsistency to them that inspires conspiracy theories even where there’s no conspiracy.
The one area where you can point to consistency is in that it consistently screws Celtic.
And that is not a conspiracy theory.
There’s a simple answer to this; the governing bodies either impose a 50-50 permanent arrangement, and accept empty seats at some – try all – of these games or they bin the idea entirely and allocate based on what they a club can realistically sell. The spectacle of having one cup semi-final sold out and the other virtually empty is an artificial construct here; if I didn’t know better I’d say it was a proxy advert for Sevco’s ability to fill grounds.
On the other hand, an all-green semi will have big gaps everywhere.
The TV pictures will tell a wholly misleading story.
And perhaps that’s what some people want.
Perhaps they just like the idea of stinging us.
Rob Petrie has made it plain that he’s no friend our own agenda, much as Stewart Milne at Aberdeen did, and whilst I have no issue with Hibs not wanting to let our fans dominate so completely at what is supposed to be a neutral venue, part of me wonders if there wasn’t some spite involved.
This is what happens when you have such incompetence at the top of the game.
Celtic are right to be pissed. The question is, when are our own fans going to start voting with their feet? When do we render this argument moot because we take the only action we have left if we want to focus these people’s minds on the cost of continually screwing with us?
This might be a blessing, because selling 10,000 more tickets on top of our original allocation wouldn’t scream to me, or to the governing bodies, that our fans have had enough. It would have told the SPFL and the SFA that we’re still good for a using, that we’re still the best weapon they have against our club’s own interests. The more our fans clamour for tickets to watch what it is painfully obviously turning into another Era of The Rigged Deck the more brazen the corruption will be.
Fans have a right to go to games as they see fit, and I would never suggest boycotting their own club’s home matches … but Hampden is the home of our enemy. I cannot put it more bluntly, or more clearly, than that.
That issue will haunt us long after these games.