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As Expected, The Press Finally Gets Around To Blaming Celtic Fans For Racism.

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Yesterday, when Scott Brown was having to defend this club from the allegation that we had done something wrong in standing by a player accused of racist abuse, a couple of the newspapers decided to add an extra element into the story; the allegation that Celtic fans had racially abused Shay Logan. One even thought to mention Morelos as well.

I’ve been expecting this line of attack since the Kamara incident happened, and there are some things which people need to remember.

First, Logan has been involved in numerous spats with Celtic and the supporters.

He didn’t make the racism claim when he says the incidents happened; he made them two months later, in the midst of a controversy. I never held the claim against Logan.

The man is a prize idiot and he didn’t volunteer the claim but rather answered a fully loaded question.

Celtic asked some internal questions about this. No evidence of it was ever found. Logan went on to make the quite ridiculous comment that he “expected” to be racially abused whenever he visited Glasgow. It has certainly never happened at Celtic Park.

The claims against Morelos are just as murky. Sure, this happens from time to time with anonymous goons on social media but the claims that our fans have subjected him to it has never stood up. One of the spurious claims of this nature was made by Sky Sports News in February of last year; do you remember what happened in that incident?

Sky took their cue from an interview with the player.

But if you watch the interview, he never made any such claim. Celtic were furious and wrote to Sky demanding answers over it, and in particular why the translator made something like that up … because that’s clearly exactly what happened.

So on the one hand you have a player at the centre of a lot of mutual antipathy making an off-cuff remark in an interview after a loaded question and another player who was as much the victim of a press stitch-up as we were, when Sky Sports literally made up a quote.

There have been one or two unsavoury incidents involving our fans down through the years; the Walters thing remains an unpardonable disgrace, there was a Celtic fan who went to jail for imitating a monkey in front of El Hadji Diouff and every now and again you get a complete moron on social media who crosses the line and keeps on going.

But Celtic does not have even a modest number of racists in its support; we self-police to an almost phenomenal degree in that regard.

I’ve personally called out a racist in the stands before and everyone around me was in agreement.

I saw another get a bat in the mouth at an away game. It is something our fans simply do not, and will not, tolerate.

This is why I don’t care how vague or coached or how hidden away in the text allegations about us are.

The media can call the club hypocrites over the Tonev thing if they want – we aren’t, but we’ve got this Kamara thing badly wrong – but they don’t get away with that.

There probably isn’t a club in Britain where racists feel less welcome in the stands than at Celtic Park.

As far as I’m concerned, apart from a few halfwits – which is true of every club in Europe and across the world – we’re beyond reproach on this one.

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