Earlier this week, the Celtic Supporters Association emailed all of its club secretaries to ask them to talk to their members about the possibility of refusing tickets for the game at Ibrox. This move is in relation to numerous events involving Sevco fans, and comes hot on the heels of the crush issue at Celtic Park.
This site and others have been debating this a while.
Celtic has never taken such a small number of fans to Ibrox.
The hostility will be incredible. The danger to our supporters is acute; I cannot put it more bluntly than that.
They will be subjected to intolerable harassment and perhaps even attack.
King and his board appear not to care about that, but I know the Celtic board does.
I was at a stag do last weekend, so I was not able to properly congratulate the club on their decision to appoint an independent firm to scrutinise the crush incident at Parkhead – the matter could not have been left in the hands of the police – but I do it now without equivocation.
The club has always taken fan safety seriously and I expected no less.
I know, too, that they have been in talks with fan reps over the Ibrox visit. The club would never have forced the issue by refusing to take tickets, but I believe they would support the association if it decided that it did not wish its members to attend the match.
There are some of our fans who will claim that any decision to refuse tickets would be a hysterical over-reaction. I disagree with them entirely.
Not only would it ensure the wellbeing of supporters, which no other outcome guarantees, but it would be a monumental news story, covered around the world, exposing the behaviour of the Sevco support in a way the Scottish media never would.
King’s self-serving gesture has endangered our fans and that has to be confronted properly and nobody in Scotland has any intention of doing it.
Shame his club, in public, and see whether Police Scotland takes its own responsibilities seriously next season if he tries to do it again.
This decision will be made by the Association’s members though, and I congratulate Joe and his colleagues for putting this issue out there for discussion.
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