CelticTV Presenter Praises The Ibrox Club For Showing Respect As Celtic Collect The Trophy.

This is an unusual one alright, and I am going to be honest right from the start; I have an ulterior motive in writing about this. On the one hand, I want to join Peter Grant of CelticTV in praising the Ibrox club and its manager for not immediately leaving the field at the weekend after they collected their losers’ medals and instead staying to pay their respects, in applause and handshakes and congratulations, to the match winners.

It’s a fine gesture. By Grant’s own admission, he wouldn’t have hung around to do it. It’s obvious that this is something Clement instructed them to do, especially as the CelticTV cameras captured his own handshake and hug for Brendan Rodgers at the end after he came off the podium … but they all did it, although it’s not clear if Alex Rae or other members of the backroom team joined in.

It’s good. As regular readers will know, anything that leeches the poison out of these fixtures is just fine by me and I can only be happy that Clement, for all his arrogance, has behaved in a professional and upstanding manner, even if it’s a modest gesture which many clubs around the world have taken as a matter of course. In a game like this, it’s still welcome.

Was this part of their famous “on the pitch talk” at the end? Was he telling his players to suck it up, applaud the winners and then go off and stew over not being on the winner’s podium themselves? Who knows? What else was there to say down there? Congratulations on losing? Nothing would surprise me, but the whole nature of that session was bizarre.

So, as I said, part of this is an effort to be as magnanimous as their players and manager were at the end of the game, even if that did not translate into some of the interviews. But, as I confessed at the start, there is an ulterior motive here as well and it should be obvious to anyone who has spent even five minutes on their forums over the last few months.

This is exactly the sort of thing that drives them nuts; the idea that their players and their manager are not as hate-filled and deranged and permanently angry as they are. Applauding the winning team, especially when that’s us? Proof, if they needed any, that these players “just don’t get it” and that they don’t feel the same “pain” as those who pay their wages.

One of the things that amazed me last night looking over their ranting was that the thread on the incident involving the manager and Todd Cantwell, where Clement physically pushed him out of the way when the player was haranguing one of the officials, was split down the middle as to who their fans think is the guiltier party; a lot of them took Cantwell’s side and said that the manager should have been raging right along with him, and that he has needlessly punished a player for doing what everyone in the team should have been queuing up to do.

Van Bronckhorst famously copped a lot of flak for being too chummy with Ange. When the story broke that they had gone for a nice dinner together some of their forums were in meltdown. It drives a lot of these Peepul off their nuts, this idea that their players are just professionals doing a job. It suggests an absence of “staunch”. It suggests a lack of people who “understand” what their “culture” is all about. The lack of the “Real Rangers Men”, in short.

And it’s true; there are few of those nutjobs in the current Ibrox team. They very obviously don’t get it, they are guys there taking a wage and that’s all. This isn’t a shock to anyone. Guys who “got it” would never applaud their rivals getting the trophy. Peter Grant himself is quite open about saying that he would not have done it in their shoes.

I just love that. I love the fact that their players did something good and that because their fan base is so hate-filled and bigoted that we can use that against them … and so I congratulate and thank their footballers for doing that, and I do so because I genuinely mean it, and at the same time I’m well aware that even if I didn’t mean it that I’d probably do it anyway because it will only make their supporters even less tolerant, even less forgiving and even more crazy.

In seeing everything through the prism of their own hate, this is the world they have created … it would just feel plain wrong not to take advantage of that fact.