Maybe Hibs Shareholders Should Look At Their Own House Before Criticising Celtic.

As a football fan there are few things more satisfying than seeing another club climb to the top of the moral high ground, point their fingers in your club’s direction, make bold statements and then slip and fall down the other side of it. There is nothing more amusing.

I’m troubled by some goings on amongst our own support. I’ve got an article on that for later, or maybe tomorrow sometime, but that myself and others are at least willing to acknowledge some of this stuff and confront it shows that many of us take this stuff seriously and are not blasé about either the problem nor how it affects other people.

But Hibs were so quick to get their self-righteous statement out the other day that I found it amazing, knowing as I do so many Hibs fans and knowing their support is perfectly capable of bad behaviour, and especially in the derby matches.

This isn’t the first time fans of another club have sneered at ours as though they are somehow better. They continually lump up in with the fans across the city, which is lazy and stupid for a start. But to palm off all the problems off-field on “the West of Scotland” clubs is a path well trodden and where others have been embarrassed time and time again.

I remember when I used to attend every away game; I lost count of the grounds I was called a fenian so and so at, and my old man has sat in almost every away support in the top flight in the last 30 years on days when he couldn’t get tickets for the Celtic end, and he can count on one hand those which weren’t filled to the rafters with bigots. There are people reading this nodding along who can relate. He actually regards Hibs as amongst the worst.

I know a lot of Hibs fans, and I’ve been at three Edinburgh derbies, one at Tynecastle, one at Easter Road and one at Hampden, and although I can’t entirely claim to be a neutral on them, in that I have a very clear and obvious preference, I thought the atmosphere was crazy and electric and as full to the brim with bile on both sides as our games against the clubs out of Ibrox.

That’s why I was open-mouthed when I realised they’d threatened to cut our allocation for fan misbehaviour with one of those matches looming. That was courting disaster.

And of course, it was a disaster. A section of their fan-base behaved like hooligans and neds. Notice that I said a section? That’s a courtesy their club never bothered to extend to us in their smarmy attempt to sound like they are on a higher moral plane.

The headlines about the trouble their fans caused are everywhere, in particular on Celtic fan media sites who are pretty gleeful and are fully entitled to be. We’re struggling with our own demons right now, and that’s going to generate more news than many of us would want, but we don’t kid ourselves on about that, and this is the difference.

So yeah, I’m doing some gloating tonight, but not without some regret. Because I really don’t want to see this kind of behaviour in Scottish football grounds and we should all want to be rid of it. But for tonight anyway I will take some satisfaction on certain people at Easter Road made to look foolish for aiming to look superior.

My advice to them; get your own house in order before you point your fingers at anyone else, and I’d say the same to their mouthy shareholders.