Danny Rohl wants Celtic to take our share of their shame.

There may once have been a time when Danny Rohl came across as a semi-serious figure. That time is long past. Celtic supporters reading his comments today must be flabbergasted by his attitude towards the events of the weekend. He seems to believe the real tragedy is that people have stopped talking about the football.

(Part of the problem is that there wasn’t any.)

His message is that everyone must take responsibility so we can return to games like that, games with full allocations. Does he believe that? I doubt it. What he really means, of course, is that nobody should be pointing the finger directly at his club and laying the blame where it belongs. When he talks about everyone taking responsibility he means everyone except him and the people he works for.

Danny Rohl had two choices after the game. He could have confronted the full ugliness of what happened and condemned it outright, or he could choose the coward’s path.

He chose the coward’s path.

Rohl claimed he was hiding in the tunnel and did not see anything. Now he has the nerve to try to spread responsibility across the game when very few people have done more to encourage the mindset of that violent section of the Ibrox support than he has.

Rohl embraced those supporters the moment he became Ibrox manager. He did it for self-preservation. He did it to protect his own position. It was unnecessary and it was gutless, but he chose that path and he has pandered to them ever since.

Confronting them now would be difficult. It would be messy. That is understandable.

Things are messy already.

People cannot endlessly moralise about the nastiness of what happened while simultaneously demanding that the two clubs return to full ticket allocations for these games. The fixture in its current form is fuelled by more hatred than it has ever seen before.

Much of that atmosphere has been cultivated by people like Rohl, who chose to flatter and legitimise the most entitled and aggressive elements of that support.

Brian Wilson’s comments were weak and deeply disappointing. Even so, he did say one important thing.

He pointed out that supporters entering the field of play after matches happens everywhere. The crucial point he left unsaid explains what made Sunday different. Supporters do not normally enter the pitch and face a violent mob.

That part was left to be inferred. Nobody at Celtic seems willing to say it plainly.

Celtic should absolutely accept responsibility for genuine wrongdoing by our own supporters. If supporters broke seats then the club should pay for them. That is reasonable.

The irony is that the Ibrox club charges more than fifty pounds per seat for those matches. Considering the number of seats ripped out in other parts of that stadium after the match, some apparently torn free in frustration and others potentially used as weapons, it would be interesting to know whether they intend to charge us for those as well.

Beyond broken seats and some graffiti that will need cleaned up, it is difficult to understand what responsibility Rohl believes Celtic must accept. Pitch invasions fall under stewarding and police control.

Beyond that, what exactly are we being asked to take responsibility for? The violent behaviour of his own supporters? The actions of the mob who stormed the pitch? That will not happen.

Two separate issues exist here and we should not blur them together.

The first involves relatively routine incidents of supporter misbehaviour. Those things happen across football. They are not unique to this fixture and they are not particularly unusual in the wider context of the game.

The second issue is far more serious. A violent group of supporters entered the field and attacked people.

Until people clearly separate those two issues, this circular debate serves no purpose. Every suggestion that Celtic should “share responsibility” really tries to make us share the blame. No matter how timid our own board sometimes looks, I am certain Celtic will not accept that.

If Rohl genuinely wants people to accept responsibility then he should start with himself.

Someone should have asked him directly about the role he played in legitimising a supporter group already sanctioned for displaying racist banners and linked to serious off-field controversies. Instead of confronting those issues he allowed the group to flourish and effectively gave them the run of Ibrox.

All of this, of course, continues to ignore the nasty anti-Irish and anti-Catholic singing that has existed here for decades. That atmosphere feeds the hostility surrounding these fixtures. When supporters belt out songs celebrating hatred week after week, it should surprise nobody when some eventually take that hatred to the next level.

What responsibility does Celtic bear for that? Very little, except perhaps for the fact that the club has spent years pretending not to hear it.

It is an extraordinary situation. Every single person connected with Ibrox now wants their shame to become our shame. That is not going to wash.

As Archer said many years ago, they are Scotland’s shame. A permanent embarrassment and outright disgrace.

That’s why we keep coming back to this, over and over again, and we will as long as we have people like this who want to deflect from the real issues.

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