Black Shirts, Bigotry And Banners: Sevco And Its Fans Have Serious Problems To Deal
It’s the symmetry of it that I find amazing …
First, Sevco releases a black version of their jersey, all the better to squeeze money out of the Gullibles in the run-up to Christmas.
£75 a shot. With “10% going to charity.”
Jesus, Peter Lawwell must be booting backsides all over our commercial department for not thinking of that.
In the meantime, Phil publishes an article showing off one of the banners their fans took to Holland last night; not the “fenian” flag that made all the papers, but one even darker, one carrying one of the evillest symbols of the evillest regime ever to hold power on the planet.
A flag with a Death’s Head logo on it, the badge of Hitler’s ghoulish SS.
It will look great alongside that black strip. Talk about an evocative image. Throw in a couple of “Red Hand Salutes” and you are really off to the races.
Did the “fenian” banner proudly wave last night?
It really doesn’t matter, because their fans did enough sectarian singing to get attention anyway.
Did the UEFA delegate report it? Possibly, but the media here reported it with dismay.
You can only imagine how they feel inside Ibrox.
Just when they need money the most, there’s a real chance that they’ll see a ground closure.
No club deserves one more, not even the fascistic Lazio. Because Sevco is a club mired in this stuff, absolutely up to their knees in it if you’ll pardon the pun. Yesterday, before the match had even kicked off, Celtic cyberspace was retweeting one of their supporter’s groups in disbelief; they weren’t asking their members to behave, just not to film any misbehaviour.
If a case is opened and they finally have to comment on last night, you wait and see … it’ll be all about the negative effects it has on them. Nobody at Ibrox will ever say – because no-one ever has – that this stuff is just plain wrong.
Their “commitment” to a club “open to all” is a marketing ploy, a stratagem designed to get good PR.
No-one realistically believes they can appeal to a broad demographic like Celtic can, not whilst they embrace militarism and Britishness and all that outdated nonsense. Not whilst they make the annual pilgrimage to Linfield. This is who they are, and everyone knows it, and because everyone knows it they have no choice but to double-down and to pander ever more to the latent sectarianism and bigotry that lies at the heart of the club.
It will never end because if it did the club would end with it. There is little doubt about that at this point, because this stuff is just such a part of the whole makeup over there now.
I don’t know if they are going to get sanctioned by UEFA over this; the signs don’t look good for them but it’s possible that the delegate missed it completely.
It hardly matters because this is a support which, like a section of ours, is not for hearing anything that contradicts their worldview and they are hell-bent on continuing to behave in a way that’s going to hurt.
All the same lame excuses are being trotted out on their forums today, and the old whatabouttery is of course being lathered over everything.
It’s exactly what Lawwell meant when he said that the flares and smoke bomb give people the excuse for their own behaviour, and allows the media to totally misrepresent our support and theirs as being the same.
Even at their worst, our fans are not like this. A death’s head logo on a flag, for God’s sake? There are no words for how degenerate and depraved that is. There is something rotten in that support and I don’t believe they will ever get rid of that element.
I don’t even think they really want to.
As Phil said, at the end of his piece, if you are wearing that notorious skull symbol, or standing next to it, or seig-heiling it or whatever else it might be, yes … you are the baddies.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hn1VxaMEjRU
The Ibrox crisis started to get real when the bank who had been keeping Rangers afloat started to sweat at the height of the financial crisis. Who were Rangers’ and Murray’s bankers before being taken over?
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