Rod Stewart Should Have Kept His Mouth Shut About Celtic’s Away Fan Ticket Policy.

Has Rod Stewart not got celebrity football matches to play? Or Boris Johnson’s posterior to kiss?

I thought he would be busier than this, than to be going around suggesting away fan ticket policy to Celtic.

If he needs something to do with himself, couldn’t he volunteer to work for a charity in his spare time?

Something productive. To put his name to good use?

What’s he doing jumping into this dead debate?

Why’s he getting involved in this, and calling our club “childish” simply because we’ve taken reciprocal action?

And is he stupid that he’s said all this in such a manner that The Daily Record has been able to twist his words into an anti-Celtic headline?

Upon being asked about the ticket restrictions, whilst on TalkSport, this is what he had to say.

“I’m so glad you mentioned that on the ban on Rangers fans – it’s so childish. t really ruins the atmosphere. We must get back to normal. It’s great when the fans are singing back and forth to each other, taking the mickey out of each other. It’s what football is all about. We have to go high when they go low, and vice-versa. Someone’s got to come out and say, we are the bigger club, we are going to have the supporters back.”

What a daft intervention to make. Because of course it let The Record do this.

Which, as you can see, he absolutely did not do, but might as well have.

I find this whole argument to be a circular mess, and it’s only a circular mess because people like this, people who should know better, keep on insisting that Celtic be the ones to step up and end it.

I have a problem with that because they either don’t know – which makes their opinion garbage – or don’t care that Celtic has tried repeatedly to resolve this and been rebuffed.

It seems to me that what many people want – Stewart included apparently – is for us to simply give Ibrox a free win here.

It’s not going to happen, and it shouldn’t happen.

Why in God’s name should our club do what these people are asking us to?

We have made overtures on this.

Take tonight’s match; we were going to guarantee them tickets for this game, but earlier in the season they, at the last second, withdrew our allocation for Ibrox by demanding an assurance Celtic simply could not give them, and which they knew we couldn’t give them.

They actually manufactured a pretext for taking away the 700 tickets we were meant to have gotten, and I use that word so that there is no ambiguity; they stitched us up.

They invented an issue, just to piss us about, after the tickets were actually printed, delivered and Celtic were waiting to send them out to supporter’s buses and fans.

Their conduct during this whole affair – since it first started – has been characterised by dishonesty and spite.

It’s chickenshit behaviour and I resent the idea that we are supposed to “rise above it” because our conduct has so clearly been vastly better than theirs has right from the beginning of this.

We don’t have to “rise above it”; they’ve gone lower than a snake’s belly.

I know some of the details of what’s been going on behind the scenes between Celtic and Ibrox over this affair, going back to the start, and I can tell you that our club has been at its most reasonable and accommodating at every stage of it.

But what we have not done, and are not willing to do, is roll over and allow our fans to be excluded from their ground whilst we put the welcome mat out for theirs, the very fans who clamoured for our exclusion in the first place.

What are we, mugs or something?

Because that’s what a mug would do.

Celtic’s policy is clear. And Celtic’s policy, for all this bitching and wailing, is fair.

We will treat other club’s fans as those clubs treat our fans.

What is complicated about that, difficult to understand about that or worth all this griping?

We will treat them as they treat us. It’s the most reasonable policy there is.

Stewart isn’t the only person to talk this kind of garbage.

Plenty of folk have written similarly poor stuff advocating that we reach for “the moral high ground” on this, apparently wholly ignorant of the problems that would cause the club with its own fans, first and foremost, and without any visible upside whatsoever.

As this blog has repeatedly asked; what’s the moral high ground worth to us anyway, except trouble?

Are we going to get credit for it?

From who? Ibrox? And what’s that worth to us as we know it would only encourage their nasty behaviour?

The media which has consistently blamed us right from the start of this, although we weren’t the ones who implemented the policy in the first place?

I am so sick and tired of that line of reasoning.

Honestly, people like Stewart should keep their mouths shut on this if they don’t know the details, and anyone who thinks we’ve been childish here, or that we should somehow change our policy to suit that of other people whilst Celtic fans are treated like shit either isn’t playing with the full facts, or with a full deck.

Either way, I think we’re all sick hearing it.