On Saturday at Ibrox several Celtic players were subjected to vicious treatment from the home team striker Alfredo Morelos.
He behaved shamefully behind the back of the referee, using every chance he had to lash out. TV cameras caught it all.
It will be investigated by an SFA panel, and if they do their jobs right for once he will face disciplinary action for it.
He could and should have been sent off during the match. If he gets a retrospective red card it will be his fourth of the season. He has been yellow carded thirteen times. His record is absolutely appalling. He is the ultimate loose cannon.
The weekend’s incidents have been highlighted everywhere; how could they not be? They were mentioned by the Sky commentators during the game. They were seen by every person who watched the match. Scottish journalists wrote about the incidents. Now some of the more absurd members of the Ibrox support have suggested that our media is racist for the way it has covered the story. And that suggestion is so out-there it demands a response.
Celtic fans like myself, and Celtic blogs like this one, are notorious critics of the media here.
There are astonishingly bad journalists in our press corps, and some who are so blinded by the blue tint that they would put positive spin on anything out of Ibrox, no matter how absurd. Some of them occasionally stray over the line, as Keith Jackson did in his article about Morelos last year, which was roundly – and correctly – condemned for the stereotyping nonsense in it. Jackson was stupid to have written that piece, but it was not malicious.
The allegations of racism against our media are ridiculous. I have never read anything in the sports pages of any mainstream title which I believed was racist. I almost can’t believe that I need to write that, that’s how outrageous, how barking, the suggestion is.
Some of the papers we have trawl the gutter with anti-immigrant bile at times … but those are the right-wing politically skewed rags I wouldn’t read in the first place.
Racism is a different beast. Such an allegation reeks of the sort of moon-howling paranoia which stalks the fringes of our game and stuns and shames every decent Ibrox supporter. Only those on those fringes would believe such lunacy.
Only people divorced from reality would push such a line in the first place.
This article is a rarity for me, in that it stands up for the press, but I have no problem at all doing it and did not hesitate to write it when a friend of mine showed me some of the accusations. I think I can speak for all the readers of this blog when I say that whatever we think of the press we do not believe this.
No matter what we thought of something the media highlighted, none of us would ever stoop this low in attacking them.
It is beneath any decent person.
What a reminder of the sort of folks we’re dealing with here.
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