Tonight Should Be About Celtic, Not Some Armchair Rebels Spoiling For A Fight.

Later on today I will cover last night’s Green Brigade statement and the response from the club.

That requires a longer article than I can bothered with right now. I wanted today to be about our massive Champions League match against an outstanding team from one of the prestige leagues on Earth.

It is a huge occasion, one that deserves our full attention.

But as has become depressingly familiar, a band of rebels – for that is how they see themselves – are intent on hijacking the occasion, and picking a fight with the club.

They’ve tried fighting UEFA, and they’ve recently started to needle Police Scotland – if there are worse ideas on Earth than a group of people who regularly break the law deliberately provoking the attention of the police, I have trouble imagining it – and have finally turned on their own club.

Make no mistake about it, tonight is about them. That’s how they see it.

Read their last couple of statements if you don’t believe me.

Even better, read the one which came out in support of them from the group that calls itself The Bhoys. That, at least, is about as honest as it can be about what the agenda is. Palestine is an afterthought to these people now, it’s all about sticking it to The Man. Lawwell. And the rest of the board of directors.

The very people who have given these people a platform which they have taken a dump on at every opportunity.

And man oh man, how their egos have grown in direct proportion to the trouble they have caused. It is telling that their statement last night claimed that Lawwell told them in 2016 that they were “finished”.

If he did then he made a colossal mistake in not backing that up. That they are claiming he made such a threat, only for them to survive and grow stronger as they see it, is telling.

They don’t believe Celtic can act against them. They are wrong. They don’t believe Celtic will act against them. They’ve already been proved wrong on that score, and the message still hasn’t gotten through to them.

Everything about their statement and the one before it reeked of a towering arrogance and a completely misplaced confidence in their own position.

It was all about them. How they’ve suffered. How Celtic has persecuted them. How the club is on their back. Previous missives have detailed how Police Scotland is out to intimidate them … in the meantime actual people are dying in an actual warzone on the other side of the world.

Amazing isn’t it? Juxtapose those two situations.

Imagine playing the victim card at a time like this.

The part I found hardest to stomach, or even properly process, was after they had made it clear that tonight is their two fingers to the board they talked up how all they want to do is give their full backing to the team.

Well, too late for that.

The mad thing is, I’m sure they will get behind the players and tell themselves it was a job well done, but they’ve cast a dark shadow over the whole night and the whole experience and we all know that the worst is yet to come because there will be – there will have to be – a reckoning for the things that have happened and which the club has put in the public domain.

Fans all across Europe have displayed Palestinian flags over the last week.

Demonstrations involving millions of people have taken place all over the world.

The Green Brigade believes that a display at our stadium tonight will be exalted and hailed and will “raise the morale” of people who are being bombed and starved and denied medical supplies.

The truth is, that’s nothing but rampaging egotism.

Those people have a lot more on their minds than what flags are flown at Celtic Park.

I wish I believed that this would do some good, no matter how small, because that might in some tiny fashion make up for the enormous confrontation this is designed to provoke … but no good can come of this.

There’s no positive outcome here, and a massive evening for our club is about to be spectacularly overshadowed by events off the pitch.

Don’t let anyone kid you that this is about Palestine any more because it’s not.

Tonight, they want a show of support for that greater cause they believe in; their own. Read their statements if you don’t believe me. Everything else, including the game, is a sideshow for these people.

They think they are the show.