Listen, let’s cut through all the bullshit; this wasn’t Airdrie fans or Wigan fans or Chelsea fans or fans of any other club. Too many people seem determined to make allowances where none should be given. We know what this was, and so do they.
Tonight, for the second time in a week, the scum section of the Sevco support has opted to cause mayhem on the streets of Glasgow. I am just back from a meeting in the city centre and my taxi driver spoke about how their fans were causing chaos all along Paisley Road West. So let’s not blame other people; who else is playing out that way tonight?
Even as I write this, I’ve been sent mobile phone footage of the scenes.
Deplorable.
Those who want to soft-soap this are doing the club itself no favours. This is the kind of stuff that they should be trying to cut out, to put a stop to, but that requires some acknowledgement about who was to blame., and as long as PR toadies in the Scottish press are focussed on reading off their “fact sheets” and blaming someone else this never gets fixed.
The thing is, I live in the city where this is all unfolding and I don’t want streets here turned into battlegrounds just because this lot are unable to cope with their nascent inferiority complex. Yet if it were restricted to Glasgow then it would be a matter for the police here to deal with and for civic Scotland to get off the fence and condemn it.
But the Peepul are “back” in Europe again, and what they do on the European stage is a disgraceful reflection back at the rest of us, at Scottish society, at Scotland as a whole. Which means it’s very much our business whether they want to acknowledge that or not. Unusually, the carnage has erupted on Scottish streets but it’s a matter of time before they unleash their brand of “culture war” on foreign shores and then, yes, it’s all our concerns.
This is a support that has been gearing up for the visits of foreign fans, and for the visits to faraway places, like the English fans used to prepare for trips abroad. Not for them any concept of making friends and leaving a good impression; as the notorious English thug Darren Wells once boasted, “you want to leave them remembering you were there.”
And the meaning behind that doesn’t need spelling out.
Sevco fans tonight decided that it was an opportune moment for making Croatian fans feel welcome here in Scotland and anyone who says that’s nothing to do with the rest of us should go and have a lie down. Not in our name. This is not Scotland. This is Sevco. Don’t let anyone get away with putting the blame on anybody else.
For all of our sakes, we need to make sure the world knows what this is.