No sooner had a posted a piece warmly congratulating Celtic on allowing The Green Brigade to put up their Palestinian banners prior to tonight’s game, but the club itself has taken them down and announced that in an official statement.
Fans are sitting around waiting for official statements and most of the time we get stony silence.
This isn’t one that is remotely welcomed.
This is only the second time we’ve heard from Celtic Park in recent months and it’s to slam a supporters group for a magnificent gesture of solidarity with people on the other side of the world.
If those who run Celtic were trying to gratuitously offend their own fans they could not do a better job than they are doing in the course of this campaign.
This club makes me despair at times. At other times it appals me.
This is one of those times.
I quite literally cannot believe that I am writing this article.
I mean, even if you accept Celtic’s statement that the fans put the banners up without permission, what were the security staff and the stewards and everyone else doing whilst the display was being created? Nobody at Celtic noticed it?
This reeks of ever greater levels of incompetence.
It is also pig-ignorance as to the views of thousands of fans. To make a public statement of this nature attacking our own supporters is yet another shocking misjudgement of the mood.
Even those who are not normally of a political bent can see residential areas in Gaza being shelled and know that that’s a despicable act and welcome any sort of solidarity with those on the wrong end of it.
It is not wrong for our club to take a quasi-political stance on this.
In fact, it is almost mandatory considering our founding principles.
At times it appears that this board of directors has no principles.
Even if the club expected the banners to be in support of Scott Brown, let’s be honest here; showing support for those poor people being terrorised on the other side of the globe is a more meaningful gesture than paying tribute to a millionaire footballer.
That our club has again failed to recognise this moment for what it is should not surprise me. But it shocks me. It disgusts me. I am absolutely astounded at the crass nature of that press release and what it portends.
At a time when it is denying information to its own supporters even as it prepares to ask them for money, even as it makes clear that sporting integrity couldn’t matter less to it by bribing the Lowland League to accept its colt teams, in gross violation of the meritocratic principle which it was only defending a few weeks ago, it has an unfailing ability to make matters worse.
I have never felt so completely and utterly adrift from this club.
Those running it make me sick right now, they really do.
I am no longer willing to pretend that I’m other than disgusted by all of them.