Ibrox Spits The Dummy As It Confirms That It’s Getting No Tickets For Celtic Park.

In a week when, to be frank, I don’t want to give those running Celtic credit for a single thing, they have at least stuck to their guns on an issue of enormous importance to this club; they have formally told Ibrox that their fans will get no tickets for the derby, and for an unspecified period Ibrox has been pursuing this with the governing bodies.

Today, the governing bodies agreed with Ibrox that they should get tickets, but, as Celtic is doubtless well aware, there’s no provision in the regulations to do a damn thing about it now that we’ve decided not to offer them any. Ibrox’s foot stamping over this is actually quite amusing, and I’ll write about that later on tonight.

But as I wrote last month, it is their club, and its demonstration of utter disdain for the rules and regulations which do exist which gave Celtic the clear impression that we could openly flaunt the rules and get away with it. They have only themselves to blame.

Celtic has now officially, willingly, broken SPFL regulations, and we’ve done so not only because we know that there will be no consequences for doing it but because this situation has become untenable.

The association can whinge as it likes. Ibrox can cry and wail and its board can chuck their toys out of the pram. They have treated us with contempt and jeopardised the safety of our supporters, and the governing bodies did nothing to stop them. They have done this with the willing connivance of a media which cannot be trusted to report on this matter accurately or fairly.

There will be plenty of moaning from those amongst the hacks who have, at every stage, twisted this story to the shape of their own choosing.

Even some ex-Celts in the punditry business will jump on this as another reason to accuse us of helping keep this controversy going. We will read plenty more of this garbage about how we should be “the bigger man” here and give their club a free pass even as it pisses on us from a great height.

There will even be some preposterous claims that we’ve taken this decision to give us some narrow advantage in an ever tightening title race, although this decision was obviously made months ago before that was even an issue and was so well known about that the Celtic sites were discussing its implications with full confidence.

And we should ignore every single bit of the media’s narrative on this as a result, because it’s got no merit whatsoever.

Even when this threatened the safety of our fans some in the press still wanted to write lies about this being some sort of pissing contest; they refused to take this seriously, or properly apportion blame to it from the very first day that Ibrox cut our allocation and they were forced to confront our automatic response to that.

Our board has not gotten much right lately, but on this issue, they continue to handle their business in the correct manner.

Ibrox would do better to quit blubbing and confront the consequences of its own actions, because it’s those actions, not Celtic’s, which have brought us here.

Obviously this is a developing story, and I’ll probably have more on it later.