This has been a vintage week for Ibrox howling at the moon; it’s just that we’ve missed it because we’ve been focussed on our own club – which is where our focus should be, of course.
Still, it would be remiss of us not to keep tabs on what’s happening over there and one of the things I’ve been watching is their reaction to the Scottish Government.
Two things appear to be irking them; the idea that Tartan Army might travel to London to watch Scotland and the idea of a Fan Zone for the coming Euros.
Those thing bother Ibrox fans because they see them as examples of favouritism.
They seem them as some kind of proof that the government hates them and that the condemnation that rained down on them for the Riot In The Square was somehow unjustified.
Think of the mentality it takes to think that way.
Think of the level of disconnect from reality that’s required to see things in the manner that they do.
Let’s start with the obvious bit; the government’s decisions were based on the health situation the country found itself in at the time.
To listen to them whine like this you’d think that just because they weren’t allowed in Ibrox that no fan should ever be allowed into a football stadium again.
There will be a modest number of fans allowed into grounds for these tournaments, even accounting for the conditions we’re in now … they wanted 40,000 fans over three days which no government in its right mind was ever going to support.
It reeked of Ibrox exceptionalism.
It’s absolutely barmy that they thought it was an appropriate request to make or that it was ever going to be granted.
In fact, I’m convinced they didn’t and only made it so they could try and embarrass the Scottish Government with it later on.
The media did its best to promote that cause; so too did Brian Wilson our own director, who wrote a quite ridiculous Scotsman piece on the subject.
But in the main, people around the country saw through that bunk.
Ibrox fan groups had explicitly called for taking over the city centre; they wouldn’t have been denied had they all been allowed into Ibrox for a week. Pandering to these Peepul makes them demand more and more and more until you finally have to pull down the shutters and say no.
I love the idea that they are moaning about the possibility – at the moment just that – of the Tartan Army going to London. For openers, no-one is actively encouraging this and the Scottish Government has explicitly done the opposite. But even if tens of thousands of Scotland fans went down there for the game there are critical differences.
The first is that the Tartan Army knows how to behave itself.
As a self-policing fan-base they are second, probably only to our own supporters.
They wouldn’t be going down there kicking off and fighting with all and sundry, and we know that.
The second is that by the time those games come around the whole country could be out of the worst of the restrictions, and therefore there will be little in the way of law-breaking by doing so.
The crucial thing here is that what their fans did was illegal, even before they started wrecking the place and fighting with each other and the police.
Besides, none of this even takes into consideration the tens of thousands of ex-pat Scot’s who stay in the environs of London and who will be there regardless.
Is the Ibrox support really going to whip itself into a frenzy over this?
Don’t they have better things to do?
As stupid as their objections to a hypothetical fan trip to London are – and bear in mind too that the regulations down there are different to those up here – their objections to an SFA “fan zone” are even more preposterous as aside from linking the public outcry over their riots to this they’ve also cast up the long-forgotten saga of their own fan-zone proposals which they claim the council torpedoed.
Which is true, but only because they ridiculously expected to be allowed to use a public facility for a private use, on an open-ended timeline.
These Peepul never forget an insult or a slight, even when it isn’t either an insult or a slight.
They live in a permanent state of anger and aggravation. And this, when they are on top. Imagine how this lot will react if we can somehow swing the pendulum back towards us again.