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Why We Should Be Delighted That Scottish Football Is Losing The “Old Firm Atmosphere”.

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Yesterday’s news that Sevco are cutting our Ibrox allocation to 800, and Celtic’s subsequent response in kind, has been greeted in certain sections of the media with despair. There is also some complaining about it going on across some of the forums. I understand that fans want to attend these games, but that’s a decision that was out of our club’s hands. We had no choice but to respond as we did; Sevco started this ball rolling.

Gavin has already written today and confidently expressed his view that it will backfire on them. My own view on this is similar. Neither of us has gone into much detail as to how, but I’m going to give you some idea of that right now.

One of the things those in the media agree on is that this is a blow to the idea of the game as the “biggest derby in the world” and I wholeheartedly concur. It wasn’t anyway, even when it was Celtic versus Rangers that we were talking about.

The whole promotion of it as such was always a false one, a desperate bid first to keep Scottish football relevant and then, later, a bid to keep the club from Ibrox feeling important. Sevco has clung to it like a drowning man would a rubber ring for exactly the same reason.

The so-called rivalry brought no benefits whatsoever to Celtic.

The atmosphere at these games is toxic. The poison that our supporters have to listen to whenever they come to Parkhead or we have to go there … who needs that nonsense in their lives? The whole so-called Old Firm experience is now rooted not only in sectarianism but in the Survival Lie and all that goes with that.

We have destroyed the notion of this as a competitive fixture on the park. Aberdeen are now our closest challengers in the league race, leaving Sevco as not even second rate. Our club cut the last commercial tie long ago and subsequent sponsorship deals have revealed the rightness of that action; we make more money going it alone than we would as part of some nonsensical pact with the devil. People inside Celtic Park never use the phrase.

That is an unspoken point of club policy.

As we have moved decisively away from promotion of this lie, their club has gripped it ever tighter.

I believed that we would continue to separate ourselves from it, in public as well as in private.

What I never expected was that the next blow to the very idea of it would come from Ibrox itself. Their actions yesterday are wholly self-defeating; the Old Firm lie was the only thing they had left. They have driven another long nail into its coffin.

Kill the poisonous fume which wafts off this fixture, the awful atmosphere that surrounds it, and what’s left of the so-called Old Firm?

Most people will be glad to see the back of that toxic hate.

That just leaves the football on the park, which was never the Unique Selling Point anyway and where we’re vastly superior. Keep on winning these games, make it routine, and any residual interest from the neutrals will go, except for those who want to see us giving this egocentric bunch a slapping.

Gerrard is here partly to experience the atmosphere of these games as a boss.

Remove that, and one of the foundations of their club, one of the things that makes it attractive, goes with it. Remember, we can survive this. We don’t acknowledge the rivalry as existing anymore; Brendan himself told a journalist to focus on Aberdeen just this week.

But to them it’s a selling point … one who’s value has been lessened by their own foolish act of spite and in an effort to appease their worst elements. That club gets it all wrong, always, magnifying its own folly in a thousand different ways.

Without us, they are nothing.

And yesterday they told us they were cutting the cord. So be it. It’s what we would have done, long ago, but for a handful of “understandings”. Now they are worthless and Sevco itself wanted it that way. Good, and so they have only themselves to blame for it.

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