Over in Germany I saw the very best of the Celtic fans. I also heard one of the worst songs that has ever been sung by sections of our support. It’s the one about an obscure member of the Sevco backroom team. It expresses the wish that he die.
I’ll be honest, until someone drew my attention to the existence of said song a few months ago I had no idea whether he was alive or had died already. Nor did I care either way. Indeed, I’ve spent more time thinking about this guy’s existential status in the last few days than I would have given him, ever, otherwise.
That song is a sewer dredging dirge.
It is horrible. It is intellectually stunted. It is juvenile.
It is the kind of stuff the other lot sing.
It has no place in the lives of the best fans in the world, which we are, as this trip made abundantly clear to me.
Now it has to be said that the number of our fans who sing this is very small.
Whenever a group of eejits tried they quickly found that stony silence from their fellow supporters is what greeted it, when it wasn’t responded to with outright hostility. It is not popular, nor should it be. Those who sing it, I don’t know what goes through their minds as they do it … nothing good, that’s for sure.
That song debases them and they ought to be able to see it.
The song is about a kit-man for god’s sake.
I might write a lot about their club – they are a hilarious, basket case organisation that I find endlessly fascinating and I love poking them with a sharp stick – but I don’t spend a second of my time thinking about someone in his post.
Who is Celtic’s kit man?
One of the guys online told me it’s John Clark; with all respect to the great man I didn’t know that.
I wonder how many people do?
This guy, he didn’t do the round of applause for Jinky. That’s the rationale behind this song, behind this ridiculous, gutter level piece of shit. He claims he observed a minute’s silence instead. Do I believe that? I honestly couldn’t give a damn. The kind of low-life who would stand there smirking and ignoring a moment’s respect for such a sublime man … is that someone who I should spend a second of my life thinking about?
Of course not.
I know about the Le Petit Merde kit-story, that he refused to lay out his gear; once again, I don’t give a toss.
The player in question knew what club he was joining. On his own head be it, now and forever. I don’t think you can hold it against a bigot for acting like a bigot any more than you can hold it against a scorpion for using its sting.
When that song was being sung over in Germany, the locals weren’t bothered about it. They didn’t get it. Yet even the yahoos who sung it were exceptionally well behaved in every other way; that’s what makes it especially hard to understand.
How did something that toxic get into our song-book in the first place?
Those supporters were brilliant over there; I said to my old man after the umpteenth time of hearing it that it was remarkable that the fans who it dawned on to sing something so spectacularly horrible would never, for a minute, have thought about insulting our hosts with a chorus of some Brexiteer chart-topper.
We are better than that.
So why the need for this?
Let me tell you what I do know about the subject of this song; he can’t stand us.
He comes from a mind-set that thinks we’re all sub-human scumbags.
All this song does is reinforces that view.
And it makes him a star.
Think he cries when he hears about that being sung?
He must love it.
The morons who sing it are doing him a favour, and embarrassing the rest of us.
Our fans are up to the task of self-policing this kind of garbage; I did it myself over in Munich, although I’m in no mood to share the details. They are unimportant. But there’s rarely been a song so in need of being weeded out of our fan base.
It is bigoted. It is vile. It is sub-human. And the guy in question doesn’t deserve the recognition it gives him.
He washes their socks, right?
We’re not talking about a guy of the slightest significance here.
He’s a nobody this song has temporarily made a somebody.
Let him fall back into obscurity; that’s what he really deserves, after all.
This article has been amended; the minute’s applause was for Jimmy Johnstone, and not Tommy Burns.