Celtic Should Now Be Actively Considering Locking The Ibrox Fans Out Permanently.

Before the kick-off at the weekend, I wrote an article where I suggested that our club should put the Ibrox club on notice about the behaviour of their supporters.

I said that we should be willing to take on the SPFL if necessary and ban their fans if there was disorder.

Whatever the punishment is for not giving them tickets, we should make it clear that we were willing to risk that and even fight it if the league body did in fact try to impose one.

The aftermath of the match has convinced me that the time for that has come.

The disorder towards the end of the game was severe. Worse was what came next, and it’s what came next which convinces me, finally, that this matter needs shutting down.

It is clear that the current situation is untenable. The decision to cut the allocations to the point where the away fans need to be surrounded in a ring of steel is clearly unsafe and it was manifestly obvious that it would be. Yet Ibrox was allowed to do this, and the police and the governing bodies rolled over for it.

So, as The Celtic Star pointed out in an excellent article yesterday, we have a limited number of choices about what we do in the future.

The allocation can be increased, a little, but that’s problematic.

Things can go back to the way they were before, which Ibrox will simply not agree to because it would involve a conflict with its own fans, we can continue as we are … or we can ban their fans altogether.

Clearly, continuing as we are is going to cause problems and those problems will haunt us all the way through the next campaign, setting up four potential flashpoints and putting our fans at risk.

If we, as a club, accept that then we are partially responsible for anything that goes wrong … that’s just an unavoidable fact. For the good of our fans we cannot accept that.

We know that things will not go back to where they were before; those days are done as long as Ibrox is digging in its heels, and I’ll get back to that later on and expand on it a bit because there’s a greater point to make about that.

Their club will certainly argue that the allocation we’ve been given is as high as they can go.

We cannot realistically give them many more tickets without renouncing our own policy of reciprocity, and even if we were willing to it would create two different standards of safety at the two grounds; their fans would be safer at our ground than ours are at theirs, so the club’s perverse position would be giving them greater security than our fans would get.

That’s obviously untenable for any number of reasons. Rule that out completely.

For the good of public safety, and for the good of our own reputation – there is an element of our support which is just dying to go toe to toe with theirs and unless we get rid of that element the only other thing to do is neutralise it by keeping the two sides apart – the argument shifts more and more in favour of refusing away tickets and banning them from our house.

I would ban them, not just on the basis that their own hard-core are anti-Catholic and anti-Irish reprobates but because it is increasingly clear that their views are reflected in the boardroom.

It is their demented statement, accepting no responsibility whatsoever and slandering our fans and the club itself, blaming police and stewards and stoking hatred, which convinces me that these fixtures are now inherently dangerous and unsuitable for away supporters.

There is creating a siege mentality and there’s putting your own fans on a war footing, and as far as I’m concerned that’s what they did.

If you are saying that the authorities did nothing to “protect you” then you are as good as telling people that they have to solve that problem by themselves and you don’t need to be Einstein to work out what the logical progression of that kind of thinking is. Their club, more than their fans, has made this an obvious call.

They are not the only ones who should be banned from Celtic Park.

The Daily Record’s sensationalist coverage of this has had a profoundly anti-Celtic bent to it.

They have regurgitated Ibrox’s comments without subjecting them to the slightest examination and yesterday they ran two separate stories which slandered our supporters without a scintilla of evidence.

The longer our club continues to tolerate that, the more of it we will be subjected to and fans are sick and tired of it and cannot understand why the club permits it.

I know we are not in favour of banning newspapers but there comes a time when enough is enough, and the fans reached that point long ago. We’re waiting on the club now to get there.