I remember the days when it was said that it was Celtic fans who were paranoid.
Do you remember those times?
They seem pretty far back at the moment, don’t they?
I don’t think there’s ever been a support as into playing the Victim Card as the one at Ibrox. They really are quite amazing at it. It takes a lot of energy to sustain that level of victimhood. It takes a lot of effort to feel that hard done by. At times I think it must be exhausting.
It’s also dangerous, of course, and this is what they rarely consider.
Sevconia is a strange place at times, and there’s a lot of strange stuff going on there and on their forums.
But this season they’ve all got threads up on what they call the “Officialdom Conspiracy.” I am not joking, this actually exists and they add to it every week as if there’s going to be some future court case where they get to present all this “evidence.”
What this does is gives them an outlet for their frustration, and that’s healthy enough I suppose, in its own way, but it also gives them a series of excuses for everything that goes wrong over there. The best of it is that this conspiracy doesn’t just seek to do them harm but it works in our favour as well, which is why some of them are convinced we got a series of dodgy decisions yesterday which helped us get three points whereas they got bad ones which cost them theirs.
And this is fascinating, of course, because what it does above all is stops them asking the real, and hard, questions about their own club.
Sevco’s manager has spent an absolute fortune in the transfer market and although they have definitely improved, and you can measure that improvement, they aren’t consistent in the least and they have a fundamental lack of bottle in their team.
Celtic might not have been brilliant in the last two games, but we have a ruthlessness about us and an ability to grind it out and get points when the chips are down. Celtic wins relentlessly. Furthermore, whatever we say about Lennon – and some of us have very real criticisms of him – he knows how to put together a winning run … which is more than the Ibrox joker does.
The longer Sevco fans delude themselves that something external is to blame for the shocking state of their club – problems which will become ever more apparent if they crash out of Europe this week – the longer this will go on and the deeper the rot will set in.
The problems are inside the walls … only on the day they realise that and start dealing with it will they take a decisive step towards real improvement.
In the meantime, they continue to do this, fumbling about looking for other people to blame.
Long may it continue, folks.
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