Chris Jack has just published one of the most dishonest articles written on the Ibrox ticket situation that I’ve read since this affair began. In it he has said that Ibrox will demand that Celtic “honour” their commitment to provide them with a Celtic Park allocation.
He knows as well as I do that we had no intention of doing anything else. He knows full well that Celtic does not consider our refusal to accept tickets to be anything other than a safety related decision, and that their club is perfectly entitled to tickets for our ground regardless of that.
He also knows that it was the Ibrox club – not Celtic – who made the decision to have the last game at Celtic Park played in front of only the home support.
This website reported at the time that Celtic would have given them their 700 tickets, and they took the decision to turn them down and claim that this was some kind of “joint decision” because, they said, they had their own safety concerns.
This site also reported that this claim was a brazen untruth, and that their decision was based on public relations and nothing more.
Jack claims that Celtic being offered 700 tickets for this game was “an olive branch.”
He knows that’s not what it was, so that, too, is a complete falsehood.
It was the same offer as was made last year, and which we rejected, with no amendments, and so they would have known that we would not find it acceptable. It was, in short, a blatant insult and a dismissal of our legitimate concerns. For him to dress it up as some sort of altruistic gesture is frankly shameful and an insult to the intelligence of his readers.
Celtic has at no time sought to restrict Ibrox fans from attending Celtic Park so this pathetic attempt at doing spin control because we’ve stuck to our guns should be rightly condemned by every single commentator who knows the facts … and that’s all of them.
Celtic has, in fact, done everything possible to resolve this situation, whilst also warning that the safety of our fans will not be compromised. This is no longer about a stupid standoff over tickets, and bickering over who has the moral high-ground; that was settled the day this started, but we have never used it to crow, only to ask that a solution is found.
This is now about the physical risks to our supporters, and that Ibrox has gotten Jack to write this piece of blatant propaganda, based on them “wanting” their tickets proves that their own statements about concerns in this regard, made last season when we first refused the allocation, were nothing but the window dressing this site and others said they were.
Ibrox had no concerns then or now about fan safety, which is why they have no intention of turning those tickets down. This is a pitiful attempt to present this as their strong-arming us into doing something we had every intention of doing.
The real issue here is why our club doesn’t feel our fans are safe visiting their stadium. That they clearly have no problem bringing their fans to ours only seeks to emphasise that point.
Jack has always believed that his access to the top at Ibrox made him special. They see him somewhat differently, as a useful idiot who they can make dangle on a string.
That’s all he’s done here.
He’s compromised his own integrity by repeating what he certainly knows not to be true.
If Jack cared about his club at all he would not be so readily trotting out its party line, he’d be asking what they intend to do to restore sanity to this matter or even more important, to bring some of it to their stands by weeding out their gutter element.
But this is the measure of the man; he’s nothing but a mouthpiece and on this occasion what’s coming out of his own gob is nothing but lies.
Every newspaper – and The Daily Record is first out of the gate – which chooses to repeat them should be called out on it as well.