Curtain twitching puritans need to stop pretending every pitch invasion is a riot.

There are historic pitch invasions, and then there are moments that become woven into the folklore of football forever. The kind of scenes people speak about decades later with that glint in the eye. The kind where emotion bursts through terraces and barriers because football, for all the sanitised corporate nonsense wrapped around it nowadays, still belongs to the people in the stands.

Three instantly come to mind.

First, England’s 1966 World Cup victory at Wembley. England winning the World Cup. Supporters on the pitch as Geoff Hurst scored the fourth goal, giving us one of the most famous commentary lines in sporting history. Nobody talks about criminality when those images are replayed. Nobody wrings their hands in moral panic. It is presented as passion, history and a nation exploding with joy.

Then there is the Scotland supporters’ Wembley pitch invasion in 1977.

The Tartan Army flooding the pitch after Scotland beat England 2-1. Goalposts broken. Turf ripped up. Chaos everywhere. Yet even now, it is spoken about almost romantically in documentaries and football conversations. “The Scots took over Wembley.” It has become part of football mythology.

Then, for us, there is the greatest of them all.

Celtic’s European Cup victory. Lisbon. The Lions. Thousands upon thousands of Celtic supporters surging forward after the final whistle as the greatest day in Scottish football history unfolded before their eyes.

The scenes in the Estádio Nacional were glorious bedlam. Pure emotion. Working-class people from Glasgow and beyond witnessing immortality with their own eyes, unable to contain what was bursting from their souls.

Those moments are not remembered with horror. They are remembered because football without emotion is dead.

Here is the point nobody in Scotland seems willing to say loudly enough nowadays. There is a massive difference between a pitch invasion born out of joy and a riot. A massive difference.

One of the clearest examples of that distinction is Barcelona in 1972, when the first club from Ibrox won the European Cup Winners’ Cup.

The disorder involving their supporters was so serious that there was no trophy presentation on the pitch. The trophy had to be handed over inside the stadium buildings because the authorities had lost control of the scene outside.

Think about that for a moment. That was not joyous emotional overflow. That was something far more serious, and that distinction matters.

Because Scotland in 2026 has entered this bizarre, hysterical phase where every supporter celebration is suddenly framed as if civilisation itself is collapsing. Every teenager jumping a barrier gets spoken about like part of an organised insurrection. Every flare is treated as though the nation has descended into warfare.

My Ginger Witch instincts have been twitching all weekend because usually when institutions begin overreacting emotionally to ordinary human behaviour, it means something else is going on underneath. Fear. Control. Optics. Panic. Narrative-building. The performance of authority. Bias.

Football authorities now seem obsessed with appearing “strong” rather than actually understanding football culture.

That brings me onto the selective amnesia surrounding recent Scottish football history, because we have seen pitch invasions and post-match disorder before. Plenty of times.

What happened? The games were temporarily suspended. Order was restored. Matches finished. People hung around afterwards.

Police managed it. Football survived. Amazing, isn’t it?

We have seen ugly scenes involving supporters entering the pitch after late goals. We have seen post-match invasions after final whistles. We have seen tensions between fans and players. We have seen objects thrown. We have seen police and stewards intervene. Yet somehow, the world kept spinning.

One of the ugliest and most infamous incidents in modern Scottish football came after Hibs ended their Scottish Cup drought in 2016. Hibs supporters invaded the pitch to celebrate the moment. Ibrox fans invaded the pitch to fight them. All Hell broke loose. There were assaults. Police intervened. There was chaos for a period.

That, too, was ugly. But even there, amidst all that disorder, the authorities dealt with it. The stadium did not magically implode. Scottish football was not cancelled forever. Life continued.

I watched those scenes this weekend for the first time, thinking they were ugly, yes, but also understanding exactly where the initial emotional explosion, the one from Hibs fans, came from. Football creates tribal release. It always has. It always will.

What irritates me now is the complete inconsistency.

Suddenly, we are being told that modern Scottish football cannot possibly cope with supporters entering the pitch. Public safety apparently demands instant abandonment. People cannot be expected to remain in stadiums afterwards while order is restored.

Why? Why exactly?

English football manages these situations. European football manages them. International football manages them. Only in Scotland do the authorities now behave as if basic crowd management is some impossible dark art.

Supporters can smell the hypocrisy. That is why people are becoming angrier. Fans know their own history. We remember the footage. We remember the celebrations. We remember the madness, emotion and bedlam that football has always produced. We know what we did and didn’t do.

The same media outlets now clutching pearls over supporters on a football pitch are the same ones that run nostalgic montages of Wembley 77 with jaunty music and laughing pundits. The same commentators condemning “crowd disorder” today will happily wax lyrical about “the famous scenes in Lisbon” tomorrow.

So, which is it? Are pitch invasions part of football culture, or aren’t they? You cannot romanticise history while criminalising the present for doing fundamentally the same thing.

Now, before somebody deliberately twists the point, because there are always bad-faith actors waiting to do exactly that, nobody sensible is defending violence. Nobody is defending assaults. Nobody is defending genuine disorder where people are hurt.

Except, there’s no proof that anybody was in this case, and there is a massive difference between a crowd celebration and a riot. Scottish football authorities increasingly behave as though they cannot tell them apart.

That is dangerous in itself, because once you start treating ordinary supporters like criminals for emotional expression, resentment grows. Distrust grows. Alienation grows. The gap between supporters and institutions becomes toxic.

I honestly think some people in suits would prefer football crowds to behave like audiences at the theatre. Sit quietly. Clap politely. Consume product. Go home. But football is not opera. Football is tribal. Emotional. Chaotic. Human.

Especially in Scotland. Especially among working-class support bases where clubs are tied into identity, family history, cities, politics, religion, migration, survival and memory itself. You cannot sterilise that without killing the thing people actually love.

That is why Lisbon still matters. That is why Wembley 77 still matters. That is why England 66 still matters. Because those moments were not choreographed corporate celebrations. They were raw human release.

Honestly, sometimes I think modern football authorities are frightened of raw human emotion because it cannot be controlled neatly for television cameras and sponsorship packages. Everything now has to be managed optics. Sanitised branding. Approved celebrations. Carefully packaged passion.

But real football passion does not ask permission first.

I know exactly how some people will react to this article. They will deliberately pretend the argument is “all pitch invasions are good.” That is not what I am saying at all. I am saying perspective matters. History matters. Consistency matters. Context matters.

If a genuine riot occurs, call it what it is. Deal with it firmly. If people commit violence, identify them and punish them. But if supporters celebrate title wins, cups, survival, promotion or historic moments by flooding onto the pitch in emotional scenes that can then be controlled and calmed, stop pretending Scotland is facing some unprecedented societal collapse. Because we are not.

We have been here before many times. Every single time, Scottish football somehow survived. The truth is that authorities managed these situations perfectly adequately for decades. Matches were delayed. Announcements were made. Police lines formed. Players were protected. Supporters eventually dispersed. Simple.

Now, suddenly, everything becomes instant catastrophe. Endless outrage cycles. Endless performative condemnation. Endless lectures from people who often seem to dislike football supporters in the first place.

Supporters notice that too. I certainly do.

My instincts always tell me to watch carefully whenever ordinary collective joy starts being reframed primarily as threat. There is usually a deeper cultural shift underneath it. A growing discomfort with crowds themselves. With collective identity. With emotional expression outside approved boundaries.

And yes, in this case, a lot of this is just plain and simple anti-Celtic bias.

Football becomes the battleground for some of the worst hypocrisy because football crowds are among the last places where mass working-class emotion still erupts publicly and unapologetically.

That is why these debates feel bigger than football sometimes. Because they are.

At its heart, this is really about who football belongs to. The supporters? Or the authorities managing them?

Lisbon belongs to the supporters. Wembley 77 belongs to the supporters. England 66 belongs to the supporters. Those memories endure precisely because emotion escaped containment. Despite all the handwringing in modern Scotland, football always finds a way to survive passion, and isn’t that what we were told this was all about? Wasn’t it supposed to be a passionate, emotionally charged end to the title race?

You cannot advertise it that way and act out when you get what you supposedly wanted. Sure, a lot of this is about anti-Celtic sentiment, and James will say almost all of it is, but this is also about prawn sandwich handwringing and curtain twitching puritanism and those in the media and elsewhere sneering at ordinary fans.

That’s a problem for me, and I suspect a lot of other people as well.

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