Celtic Fans Are Getting Tickets For Ibrox For One Reason: The Home Side Has No Choice.

If you’ve been reading the papers tonight, you’ll see that we’ve been allocated 700 tickets for the Bigot Dome next month.

The press are saying that we have been “handed” them, whatever that means, presumably in the same way that we will only win the title if we are “handed it.” Their biases show up everywhere you look for them.

This is supposed to what? Frame this as an act of charity? As if this is them breaking the ice a little, taking the initiative and grabbing for the moral high ground? It is no such thing.

Ibrox is giving us the bare minimum of tickets that it is allowed to. Period. There is no more hiding behind virus restrictions, because by the time the game kicks off those would no longer exist. There are no more red zones, and with the end of those comes the end of whatever arrangements clubs could make with themselves.

Now they, like everyone else, have to follow the mandate. And the mandate gives us a guaranteed allocation. That’s why they’ve done it, because they had to.

So tomorrow or whenever you read that their club has made the first move towards rapprochement, ignore it completely. They are doing this out of obligation, not generosity.

The Gutter Ball might be going ahead at the time of writing this, but as has been pointed out the negotiations for that were handled entirely separately for both clubs.

There is no relationship between our club and theirs. None. Not even the friendly, formal one which exists between ourselves and all the other clubs in our orbit. To say we’re at a rock bottom in our dealings with Ibrox is an understatement.

At every single stage in this process, the media has cosied up to them and taken their side.

The narrative has always been that no matter what else has happened that Celtic have acted in some sort of unreasonable fashion by not rolling over, by imposing the same on them as they inflict on us.

I don’t expect honesty from the hacks now.

Celtic will respond in kind, of course, and their club will get 700 tickets for Parkhead. There will be all the predictable whinging and wailing when we do this, but we ought to hear none of it.

This situation exists because they wanted it this way.

The only thing that’s changed here is that we’re back to where we were before the virus hit. With no further wiggle room, and no excuses for denying us tickets, they’ve given us a tiny fraction of what we one got; one tenth of the old total.

I see no reason why we should even be grateful for that.

They aren’t doing us any favours here, and all talk to that affect is just garbage.