Celtic Must Be Furious About The Latest Green Brigade Incidents. This Won’t End Well.

“Don’t worry, be happy”? Really?

A four word answer from The Green Brigade today, to a scathing statement from Livingston. Everything about that response is moronic and childish and downplays a serious situation, a serious situation for our club, our fans and for The Green Brigade itself. These guys either just aren’t getting it or they just don’t care.

Celtic fan allocations are getting slashed across the boards, for just about every away ground in the country already. Ibrox started this, for their reasons, but a lot of the other clubs have reasons of their own and those reasons have to be respected to an extent. A lot of it is being driven by demands from their own supporters, and that was the catalyst for the Livingston statement.

It comes on the heels of one from Hibs. And one from Motherwell. Before that there was one from Hearts. You get the drift. All about one group of our fans. One. A tiny number of our vast support. That is surely not a tenable position.

Celtic already have concerns over the way they’ve behaved in and around our own stadium and the way they’ve treated our own staff. The spectre of what they might do to get us severely sanctioned in Europe hangs over the club like the Sword of Damocles.

And everyone knows it’s a matter of time.

I know a lot of people are highly resistant to the reality of this, but we’re fast coming to another crisis point here. The Green Brigade have become a serious problem for Celtic, and one that the club is going to have to deal with, and probably not in a gentle way.

They have no respect for anybody; not for the league, not for the rest of the clubs, not for our own supporters or for anyone at Celtic Park. They won’t listen. They won’t accept that the rules apply to them. They act as if they have a right to behave as they see fit.

The banners which Livingston have an issue with are only part of the problem. They’ve hinted at problems involving a security gate, and they cannot have been pleased by the pyro at all.

So this already impacts on the ordinary fan who just wants to go to games, and especially away games. Supporters’ buses are dying because the away match experience has been eroded to the point where some of them don’t bother any longer.

Part of the problem is that some of our fans are just not willing to respect the rules of the house when we visit other clubs and those clubs don’t want that in their grounds, and I can understand why.

I’ve been hypercritical of the Ibrox support in recent weeks, and for good reason, but we have problems in our own house. They are different problems, but that doesn’t mean we can simply ignore them. The Green Brigade are unlikely to commit a hate crime, but they’re already breaking the law most weeks and that needs to be acknowledged.

This isn’t going to end, not until it’s brought to a bad end, and I can only conclude, with great sadness, that as things stand the club will eventually do it, because they have no choice. They’re not being given one right now. How do you deal with people who won’t recognise limits and will ignore regulations and act as if they have a divine right?

No such right exists, and Celtic has already sanctioned them during this campaign as if to prove it. It’s a matter of time before another, and quite possibly permanent, solution is applied. I wonder at times if there’s not a certain inevitability about it.