Celtic’s Scottish Cup Ticket Allocation Is Both Sensible And Fair. Ibrox Can Pipe Down.

The SFA has just announced the ticket allocation numbers of the Scottish Cup semi-finals, and there is much wailing, gnashing of teeth and stamping of the feet going on because of a decision to make the Ibrox-Hearts game a 50/50 split and to give Aberdeen a mere 19,000 tickets for our game whilst we get the lions share. I don’t know what people expected.

This is both sensible and fair, and will avoid a security nightmare somewhere down the line. The only people moaning about this are the usual suspects and those across the city who enjoy bitching about something. The SFA says it has considered previous sales figures. That’s the right way to do this, and in fact I’d be astonished if Aberdeen sold all the tickets they do get.

19,000 is more than their average attendance. That’s every Aberdeen fan who goes to games every week guaranteed one. Celtic Park holds 60,000.

We’re getting roughly 23,000 tickets. That’s much less than half of our supporters who attend every game who will get one.

This is how it’s supposed to work. The split is relatively even, we’re getting a handful more tickets than Aberdeen is and nothing like the number to satisfy demand.

Ibrox is moaning because they are getting parity with Hearts, but Hearts regularly sell out their stadium and will bring a more than adequate support.

Even if they don’t, hey, both sets of fans can get comfortably sit in the same stands and sing the same desperate bigoted bile and cheer on Steven Naismith. I am being flippant, yes, but in fact I think they will sell out their allocation and that’s the difference between them and Aberdeen.

If Aberdeen can’t sell out half the stadium, how do you give Celtic the rest of the seats, especially if they’re all over the place? You end up with gaps all over the shop and our supporters being even more disenfranchised. This is none of Ibrox’s business anyway.

They will get 21,000, and if they want to moan about getting 2000 less than us too bad because our ground holds 10,000 fans more than theirs anyway and so even proportionally it works out.

This is a classic case of Ibrox “much ado about nothing” and the media sound pathetic in trying to create a controversy here.

In terms of how previous allocations have been handled, this is one of the fairer solutions.

If people want to have complaints they should be asking where the 10,000 briefs which aren’t on sale to the ordinary punter have gone; even taking into account the debenture holders, that’s an obscenity in this day and age.