Fear And Loathing In Sevconia: Sweat, Tears And Bile As The Ibrox Club Exits Europe.

Tonight, the drums are silent. There will be no march to Dublin for those who so desperately wanted to go.

Before the game they raised their blue bus banner, promising to travel there to cheer on their team, hell-bent on going there to take over the streets. That would have been … interesting.

Thankfully we’ll never know. Out they went, like a blown light-bulb and with that same faint popping sound.

What was it TS Elliot said? “Not with a bang … but with the wet sound of Todd Cantwell falling on his backside on a soaked pitch.”

It was something along those lines anyway.

The Benfica goalkeeper spent most of the game trying to work out the words of the Ibrox fan songs which rose up and down as the night wore on. I can save him the trouble of playing it back; fella, you really don’t wanna know.

But UEFA should, and I’m going to cover that in a little more detail in the morning. But for now, let’s just say that these Peepul got what they deserved tonight and we can only hope they continue to get it as this season winds down.

That was a festival of sweat, snotters, tears and the bile that poured forth from the stands. On a night as savage as that, you don’t expect to see a lot of football, but there were public park teams all around Scotland tonight who would have been thinking “we could have taken either of these” as the game dragged on and on and on.

Watching large spells of that was like injecting poison directly into your own eyeballs.

The single goal that decided it was, actually, a pretty well taken one.

Most amusing, even more than the near certain knowledge that it had put the Ibrox club out – as they had never seriously tested the opposition keeper – was the commentary team trying to convince themselves that “the VAR lines” would knock it off.

Amazing that none of them twigged until some member of the backroom team gave them the bad news that only one line mattered, the halfway line, and both Benfica’s players had been clearly behind it.

Too bad, so sad. The linesman’s flag had gone up but the goal stood. There will be people crowded onto subway platforms right now telling themselves that the Unseen Hand had reached out from Rome again to do them wrong.

Well, you keep on singing about killing fenians before you die and that just might upset people. And they did that all night long.

The one thing that struck me tonight is that this is an Ibrox team which looks dead on its feet. Without officialdom’s intervention at the weekend against Hibs, who knows what the state of that club would be right now, but they do not look like they have much energy left in them. I would have been glad for extra time on top of that.

Two more games in this competition for them wouldn’t have bothered me one bit either; Benfica were, and are, a bad lot who are not going to trouble the sleep of Milan or Liverpool or even West Ham, all of whom would clearly dispatch either of these sides with measured ease.

Where that team of theirs would have found the energy to even contest those games I do not know.

It’s a moot point like everything else. STV News can put their speculative piece on how Dublin would cope with a Sevco-Liverpool final in the bin where it should have been in the first place. Ain’t nobody gonna need to worry about that now.

My old man turned to me at one point in the second half, after their latest long ball bomb had gone over the heads of everyone on the pitch and landed in the stand and asked me “How are this lot top of the league?”

A good question with a simple answer; because of us. Yet their manager enjoys the long honeymoon and the adulation of the media.

And it’s because of that gush of emotional ooze that it’s satisfying not only seeing them go out tonight but to go out in the manner that they did, barely troubling Benfica at all, looking like a team with not much left in the tank.

That could be interesting.

That could be very interesting indeed.

But across Sevconia tonight the drums are silent. The march to the home of the enemy will not now take place.

And so Dublin’s fair city will remain fair, absent the sounds of crashing and baying and breaking and smashing.

There will be no pools of vomit, vodka and blood. The Peepul are not coming. They never really were.

For those who enjoy the comments on here, there’s a new site you should check out and register on; it’ll publish one article per day on a point or topic of interest to our fans, and from there you can debate that issue and any other peripheral one. The site can be found at the below link; you will need a verified account to log in and start the discussions but I hope to see you all there. 

Officials And Injuries Need To Be Managed. Celtic’s Season Depends On It. – An Internet Bampot