If The Ibrox Gutter Element Is A Minority, Shouldn’t They Be Easy To Deal With?

Earlier on, when I published my piece about how Scottish football needs to face up its own issues and finally reckon with the fans at the club across the city, I heard a lot of nonsense along the lines that I am tarring the whole support with one brush and that this problem remains limited to a “small minority” of their fan-base.

I’ve heard it before. We all have.

But nobody ever confronts the blatant contradiction at the heart of this assertion; if there are so few of them, why haven’t they been dealt with before now?

If this is such a tiny segment of their support, why haven’t the “good fans” rallied alongside the club to purge them from the stands forever?

If this is such a small number of people, why hasn’t the press highlighted their despicable chanting again and again and again and helped the club properly confront this instead of letting them ignore it for years?

It shouldn’t be hard to do, after all.

The trouble with this oft-stated nonsense is that it’s easily contradicted by the hard facts and by the simple act of opening ones ears and eyes. At St Johnstone and Dundee those songs didn’t emanate from a “small minority” but from near enough the whole away support.

We forget that the SFA has rules on this stuff and that a club is liable for sanctions unless it can prove that it has taken “reasonable steps” to rid this stuff from the stands. Where are those steps? Ibrox’s failure even to condemn this damns the club … and until the SFA forces them to confront it they quite clearly aren’t going to bother.

If this is a “small minority” then what exactly is the SFA and Ibrox waiting for?

If you were at the SFA and wanted to get to the bottom of this there are certain questions you would be asking the club at Ibrox.

First, when does the club intend to comment on this stuff?

Secondly, what steps have you taken to identify those whose behaviour shames the club?

Thirdly, what measure have you taken to punish those responsible?

This is the bare minimum of what the governing body should be doing, and if this is a small number of fans then the club should be able to demonstrate real progress, instead of the shameful regression we’ve seen in recent weeks.

This “small minority” stuff is, of course, risible nonsense and the problems Ibrox has are much, much bigger than that.

This is a deflection tactic which is as old as the hills.

It should be called out as such, because if this was a small minority they’d have sorted it out years ago … and I cannot believe that nobody ever blows that excuse out of the water.