Daft Journalist Is Banging On About Celtic, Tickets And The Worthless “PR Win” Again.

Alison McConnell of The Evening Times appeared the other day on the same show as decided last week that Hugh Dallas was an appropriate person to interview, and she started banging on about how Celtic should relent and let Ibrox fans into the ground in January.

Nothing new there. The media has been singing this same song since they denied us tickets to theirs.

It is amazing how good the media is at victim blaming.

It’s even better at it when the victims refuse to play that card and instead hit back. We were not only entitled to, we were bloody obliged to. Somehow has to stand up to the Ibrox club and not allow them to walk over everybody.

In this case it was us. I only wish we’d do it more damned often.

But McConnell has previous for going further than many of the other hacks. She is the one who not that long ago started banging on about the “moral high ground” and how Celtic should simply just back down and tell Ibrox they can have whatever they want.

During this interview, she was at that again. She claims that she’s tired of the whole thing and that Celtic has neglected “the PR win.”

I’m sorry if that makes me laugh. But it does. It’s one of those suggestions that is so surface stupid that you want to look at the person who made it to see if they are trying to keep a straight face. I rather suspect she means it, which means I worry for her employers and any dependants she might have; I wouldn’t want her operating any complicated machinery.

Exactly who was going to award us this “PR win”? The media? Oh please.

The media would have said Ibrox had outlasted us and then sniggered when the club over there failed to respond in kind. It was Ibrox who started this, yet right from the start it is Celtic’s entirely reasonable response which has generated negative headlines.

So the people who have spent all this time trash-talking us for standing up for ourselves were finally going to give us credit for wimping out? What a joke that is; not a single person with functioning brain cells could possibly believe that.

And even if it were true, what do you get for it? Not a damned thing, and certainly not a guarantee that the other side will finally play nice after they’ve refused several efforts – which Celtic have made both privately and publicly – to restore things to the way they were.

It’s as if McConnell and the media were playing the role of the teacher who when a kid winds up in detention for the umpteenth time because he’d rather fight the bully than give in to him says “Oh for God’s sake, why can’t you just give him your damned lunch money?”

Well, no thanks. It’s kind of you to offer partial credit for that … but it’s no use to me if I’m starving and probably still get a punch in the face for it.

Even if there were some award like a humanitarian gong, something we can hang on the walls at Celtic Park for Doing The Right Thing, what good is that if every supporter who passes it spits on it because of what it suggests to them; that Ibrox runs the table, that the club has no appetite for battle, that when it comes to the crunch we back down?

If Celtic was suddenly feeling altruistic, the confrontation with its own fans over the issue would soon take care of any warm memories it threatened to bestow. To say that most of us would be furious is a mammoth understatement.

And I strongly suspect that’s what some in the media want here; to bounce the club into a decision which would appal and offend our fans, at a time when many of us are already pretty stunned and even disgusted by the lack of respect the club has for us.

McConnell’s argument – haha what argument? – isn’t even presented terribly well.

She knows that what she’s asking is plainly ridiculous, she seems almost angry that the club didn’t take her advice when she first offered it on this issue, but why would we have? It was a stupid idea in the first place and it hasn’t improved with age.