Scottish football won’t deal with the hatred. So we work around it instead.

If you listen, you can still hear the gnashing of teeth and the wailing over Celtic’s post-split fixture list. This is especially loudest from the direction of Ibrox, and the leaders of Scottish football, Police Scotland and other bodies are getting it in the neck.

This article badly wants to be two articles. But this is one article rather than two, because the two articles I had planned were both leading to the same place and essentially saying the same thing. We have issues in the game here, and those issues are mostly about what doesn’t get said around the margins.

One of the things Police Scotland would absolutely have had to talk about, and decide on, prior to okaying the fixture list would have been the likelihood of serious disorder at one of the games.

We know which club they would mostly have been concerned with, and it is not Celtic. There may be a conspiracy of silence around what happened at Ibrox, but everyone knows what happened at Ibrox. Everyone knows whose violent, thuggish supporters are the biggest cause for concern.

Maybe nobody wants to say it out loud, but I am sure it is one of the factors considered when operational matters are being discussed by Police Scotland, by the SPFL and by everyone else who is a stakeholder in the game. Ibrox fans riot when they win things. We already know how they respond when they don’t.

Furthermore, Martin O’Neill made an interesting point today when he sat at his press conference and talked about the fixture list itself.

He said the Glasgow derby might have been scheduled on a different week, except that there is what he described as a march in Glasgow city centre on one of those weekends. I’m guessing that if it’s not an Orange parade, it is one that the thugs and neds in their support would have been seriously opposed to, and that’s why the game couldn’t take place then.

It all comes down to the same thing.

There is an element of that support, and an element of the cultural ethos surrounding it, that is intolerant and now also increasingly violent, and that has had an impact on the fixture list. Where I started, this wanted to be two different articles, but actually it belongs in one because the Scottish football authorities are prisoners of their own bullshit rationalisations in the same way the Ibrox club is a prisoner of theirs.

We promote this game through the prism of the Glasgow derby, but the Glasgow derby is a hate-filled spectacle that has become increasingly dangerous because half of it is simply incapable of civilised behaviour or any form of restraint.

We talk about the best derby in the world. But we dare not schedule a league decider involving those two clubs, and we jump over every obstacle and bend over backwards to make sure there isn’t going to be one.

Thus, our so-called unique selling point is also the very thing that ensures we can’t market it that way in any proper sense. Because it is a spectacle of hate. If people want to know why the governing bodies here can’t organise their shit into the pan, that’s why. It’s because they try to juggle the contradiction instead of confronting it.

This problem is not going to go away until it is tackled in a robust fashion.

Until it is tackled in a robust fashion, we’re going to have to live with all the little ancillary consequences that attend to it. We’re going to have to live with being unable to schedule a league decider if it involves these two teams. We’re going to have to live with restrictions on the number of away fans permitted to attend. The game is going to have to live with scheduling that takes into account things happening on the streets. Those things dovetail too perfectly with the nature of this fixture.

When you cannot market the biggest fixture in a sport to the fullest possible extent because of all the baggage that fixture involves, any association worth a damn might just think it is about time that the baggage was removed.

They might think that the source of should be tackled to change the way that fixture interacts with our national life. But nobody wants to do it. Nobody even wants to say what the problem is. Yet in this decision about the fixture list, you can see that everyone, while trying to ignore it, is also working around it all the time.

It reminds me of something, and I realised last night what it was.

If you’ve watched The Crown on Netflix, you may remember one of the plot points in the early episodes about how King George had cancer and how his physicians treated the symptoms without actually treating the disease.

They did what we’re doing here. They worked around the problem without naming it, without confronting its full nature. I’m not going to say that’s what killed him. I don’t know enough about the real history to separate it from the fictional version on TV. But I do know that when you’re treating the symptoms of the disease, the disease only gets worse, and that’s where we are right now.

That’s why the fixture list looks like it does.

Because their club allows that element of their fan base to basically run the table. Because the Scottish media won’t point to that section of the fan base and blame them for the incidents at Ibrox and call them out on their general behaviour. It’s because the governing body does not want to deal with the issue. Because even Police Scotland does not want to point conclusively and definitively at the nature of the problem in any realistic sense. Because no one wants to actually name it, it prevents us taking the kind of action that might actually end it, or at least make it manageable.

But everywhere you look, you see people reckoning with the symptoms of the disease. It’s there in scheduling. It’s there in the timing of games. You see it in the fact that Scottish football still has an alcohol ban more than forty years after the first Hampden riot.

It’s there in every single major strategic decision about policing and fan numbers allowed at games. This is visible in the fact that supporters have to be in the opposition ground two hours before kick-off. Everywhere you look, you see the symptoms of the problem being dealt with.

So, the obvious question is how long until we tackle the disease itself? How long until we get to root causes and actually deal with the problem, and not just the effect it has on everything in the game here?

If Ibrox fans want to cry the blues about Police Scotland interference, or about the SPFL juggling the fixture list to make sure certain outcomes are avoided, if they want to point the finger and look for the people responsible, they should try the mirror.

Stop looking for external causes. Start looking at yourselves. Start looking at your own behaviour and at what goes on in your own house, because that’s why we’re here and that’s why we can’t move on.

You won’t face the truth. You won’t confront your own demons.

Because the rest of Scottish football would prefer to ignore them than acknowledge them and have to do something about them, shame on everyone involved. Shame on everyone who doesn’t want to get involved, who doesn’t want to have the conversation, who doesn’t want to face the facts.

So, we dance around it. We fiddle around the edges. We bend this whole game into shapes that don’t make a lot of sense outside this country.

Smarter people than this would deal with the issue and clean up this game.

Then we could have a derby that, as Paulina pointed out in an outstanding article last month, would not lose any of its fervour or intensity because it would still be a local derby. It would still be culturally, politically and socially significant. It would still be a derby between the two biggest clubs in the country.

The only difference is that it wouldn’t be so weighted down with hatred. That derby we could sell to the world. It’s a derby we could work around like it was just another game. That derby we could schedule as a title decider if we wanted to, if circumstances gave us that chance.

Instead, we live with this rotten, wretched cancer instead.

Yes, shame on all those who won’t face or speak the truth, and to Ibrox fans most of all.

You want to know why the fixture list looks the way it does?

It’s because of some of you.

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