Define Irony; The Scottish Press Telling Our Rivals To Use The SFA Against Celtic Over Tickets.

You have to laugh at the media at times. This is one of those times.

They have almost no sense of irony at all.

If they did, they would not tonight be advising our rivals to lobby the SFA to come after our club.

The team that plays across Glasgow has spent months waging war against our governing bodies; the idea that they would go wailing to them like little bitches because our club is telling fans that their supporters won’t be allowed in the ground in January is hilarious.

I’ll tell you, I said tonight that I wouldn’t be surprised if our club reversed itself on this, because it lies to our fans now with such regularity that something like this wouldn’t bother them one bit.

But here’s the thing; if they do let their fans into the ground they won’t be able to hide behind the regulations in order to explain it to us.

When the rules on red zones inside the grounds were relaxed, there was a little qualifier which the press appears to have missed in its own pique over this decision.

Clubs weren’t told to scrap red zones; they were told that they were no longer mandatory.

Clubs were told that individual arrangements would be entirely at their own discretion.

A combination of health protocols and other security measures could easily result in our club, quite legitimately, telling Ibrox it’s impossible to arrange. And if we make the decision there is absolutely nothing that anyone can do to stop us, including the SPFL and the SFA.

So the media is really urging that they try to hold us to a rule which, under the present circumstances, is entirely redundant. The regulations guaranteeing an away fan allocation are still, at the moment, superseded by the rules in place in Westminster and Holyrood.

So in essence, our media – which doesn’t even pretend to be neutral on this issue and has taken their side of this from Day One – is pissing in the wind.

But I do love how brazen they are about asking the club over there to kiss and make up with the SFA just to overturn any decision that we make, and what makes it especially hilarious is that I can imagine Ibrox doing it.

I can also imagine Hampden attempting to force the issue, and that’s where I think our club is going to have to have more bottle than some of us give it credit for.

This is a minor matter, but it’s a symbolic one and we have to see it through, and anything else makes us look weak.

The SFA has no business trying to enforce this on us, the regulations on it are perfectly plain that if we decide to re-impose red zones or if we think the current arrangements we have in place don’t accommodate a high security event like this then that’s the way of it, and people on the other side of the decision can squeal like pigs, but to no avail.

My gripe is with the press on this, for their helpful “suggestion” to our rivals tonight.

You can tell, by the way, that it’s more than that, because three or four of the titles suggested the same course of action almost simultaneously, which tells me they were all fed the same line at the same time, and the most likely people to have done that work at Ibrox.

So I don’t know whether this is the press acting as Douglas Park’s nodding dog or if it’s something else, but I know that it’s no coincidence that they are all recommending this and blaming Celtic for escalating this matter, which we haven’t in any way done.

All we’ve done is do what we said we would do right at the start of this thing when they cut our 7000 allocation to a mere 700. We will treat them as they treat us, and if they think that’s unfair they can stop playing games and get serious about sorting stuff out.

And anything the media has to say on it should be viewed through the prism of bias, because right from the beginning they took Ibrox’s side and in that, at least, they have been consistent.