Rodgers Slapped The Media Who Still Won’t Acknowledge The Truth About Celtic’s Ibrox Ticket Stance.

I am absolutely, thoroughly, completely fed up with having to “correct” that rag The Daily Record when it deliberately misrepresents us or our position. And although the example from yesterday might seem like a modest one, it’s a line on a continuum.

Rodgers sat yesterday at the presser and someone asked him about the resolution the club has reached over the number of tickets we’ll get when we next visit Ibrox.

He did nothing but tell the plain and simple truth when he pointed out what we all already know to be a fact; Celtic never wanted to cut the Ibrox’s club Parkhead allocation in the first place.

That Rodgers feels he needs to get that on the record is telling in itself, but it’s no less so based on the way that The Record chose to cover it. “Brendan Rodgers insists Celtic never wanted to cut (rival fans) allocation as he wants more tickets for each club.”

But why should Rodgers need to “insist” on any such thing?

He certainly did not insist on it. That implies that he’s trying to convince people. That implies that there is some doubt over where we’ve been positioning ourselves over the course of this affair and that’s simply not true at all, and we all know that it’s not true in spite of the media’s constant attempts to suggest otherwise.

These people are in the business of using words.

They know exactly what the connotations of “insist” are. They know exactly what they are doing and I’m damned if we should be letting them do it.

Celtic have been crystal clear on this from Day 1 of this whole shoddy affair as we know and as the media knows full well. Rodgers is not “insisting” on anything, he’s reminding people who are content to ignore it that this has been our position all along, and we have never shifted from it, not even one millimetre, in the years that this row has rumbled on.

It stinks the way the media has covered this, it absolutely stinks.

From the get-go they’ve ignored or tried to dance their way around what we all know is the single most indisputable fact of this whole affair.

That Ibrox did this. That they began it. That they have escalated it in every way they were able. That their pettiness, their spite, is the sole reason we’re here and that in spite of every provocation and act of malice Celtic has been utterly reasonable.

We never, for one minute, deviated from our initial statement that if they were willing to grant us our previous allocation we would, without hesitation, give them theirs. Our response to this has merely been to treat them as they treat us and until we were forced, by the grossly unsafe environment they put us in, to resort to drastic action we were entirely fair minded.

Rodgers simply reminded them yesterday that these are the facts, in spite of their clear wish to deny them. I thought that was brilliant.