Scottish football continues to dance around what happened at Ibrox.

As we get closer to Sunday’s game, more and more you’re reading articles in the papers from people talking about the fan ban, as it’s being called. But let’s be clear: that’s the wrong word to use, because it suggests that the governing bodies have done something momentous and imposed some great punishment.

That isn’t really what happened. This was not a unilateral punitive ban handed down by the SPFL. The Ibrox club proposed cutting Celtic’s allocation to 300 tickets, Celtic rejected that and sought a determination from the league, and the eventual outcome was an agreed temporary arrangement involving the clubs and the SPFL that there would be no away supporters at their SPFL meetings this season.

You know, there are times on here where we talk about the environment in which we operate and ask why so many people in that environment seem to be stupid, whether wilfully stupid or just plain ignorant.

I have to ask that question again in relation to this.

Why are there so many people in the commentariat who see this as a plague on both our houses? Why do they want to blame supporters of both clubs?

Why do they want to suggest that what needs to happen is for both clubs to get over themselves, sit down and talk about this?

How can they not see it?

Whatever happens on the pitch on Sunday, I know several things about the game and about what is going to happen during it.

First, the entire day will be a bigot fest and the media will not overly focus on that, although it lies at the root of so many of the problems which exist around this fixture.

I also know that if Celtic win, the place will be incredibly hostile. The only comfort I can draw from that fact is that the hostility will be turned as much on their own players and their own club as on ours. But it would be naive in the extreme to think that our guys will therefore be completely safe.

I don’t know who will win the game. I suspect we will.

I don’t know whether there will be any serious incident involving supporters, but I would not be in the least bit surprised if there were.

What I do know is that there will only be one set of supporters in the ground. And if there is a serious issue, a serious incident or a serious problem, the media will do its very best to downplay it as the work of a sole individual or a minority of individuals.

They will completely ignore the larger context, which is that games at Ibrox are played in an atmosphere of extraordinary hostility and hatred. That is the real issue the media has not wanted to confront for years.

I know a lot of people take comfort in the idea that if only one set of fans is in the ground, then they are the set who will be blamed if anything happens.

Don’t hold your breath on anything changing. Don’t hold your breath on anything positive coming from whatever gross negative happens to manifest itself.

There won’t be any positives to take from it.

You saw what happened earlier in the week when a group of Ibrox fans took part in a battle in a wooded area alongside hooligans from Hansa Rostock and Lyon. Afterwards, participants posed in front of Nazi imagery and there were Nazi salutes.

The shame there was restricted to one Scottish club.

Yet the Daily Record ran an article which repeatedly widened it into Scottish football’s problem. And that is how any trouble which erupted on Sunday would be framed: as part of a continuum, as part of a pattern which involves our supporters too.

There will be no reckoning. And the Ibrox fans know it.

That is one of the reasons why I’m concerned about the game.

Because the finger never gets pointed where it belongs. Blame never gets apportioned to those who deserve it. And all around the commentariat are people who continue to treat the Ibrox event in March as if the exceptional moment which turned it into something truly dangerous was simply our fans being on the pitch.

But that was not the truly exceptional moment. That was not the truly dangerous moment. We all know what the truly exceptional and truly dangerous moment was, and it is as though there is a great wall of silence around it, in spite of the independent review making absolutely clear how close events came to something much worse.

The more people try to widen the circle of blame, and the more people refuse to engage with the reality of what Scottish football’s biggest problems actually are, the harder those problems are going to be to solve.

Because you entrench people in them.

If the Ibrox club is never held accountable, why does it have to act responsibly? If sections of the Ibrox support are never confronted with the ugliness which exists within parts of their culture, why would anything change? If people are not punished for unacceptable behaviour, there is no incentive for them to alter that behaviour at all.

Far from reinforcing the idea that certain lines cannot be crossed, you reinforce the idea that they can get away with what they have done so far.

Then the envelope gets pushed further.

And further. And further.

Before this season ends, I think we are going to see far-right banners in Scottish football grounds. Ibrox might not be the only place where it happens. But I know this: the guys leading black-balaclava parades on Glasgow streets did not spring up out of nowhere.

It is as I said during the summer protests; if you are a Celtic fan and you thought those scenes were cool, you must have missed the preponderance of blue jerseys in and around them. You must have missed the fact that we are an immigrant club and that we emerged from an immigrant community and still have our roots there to this day.

This fixture was ugly enough before this new and horrible element was added to it. Scottish football is sleepwalking towards a disaster in this regard, and so I find it absolutely astonishing that people in the commentariat continue to confuse where we are and what the problem actually is.

There has also been commentary about people wearing balaclavas at games. Personally, I don’t know why anyone would do that. I would never do it myself.

I understand that, in ultra culture, there is sometimes a statement being made about the surveillance state, and I know a lot of people strongly object to police filming them and their sections. But again, there are two different things here.

There are people who wear face coverings as part of ultra culture, and there are people who wear them for far more sinister reasons.

Once again, you are taking two separate strands of something and making them sound as though they are alike when, in fact, they are not.

I would ban the wearing of any kind of face covering in football grounds. There you go. That’s my personal view on it. But not every face covering is worn because the person underneath intends to behave like a thug, and that distinction is worth keeping in mind.

Then there is this stuff about something being “missing” from the fixture.

Why? I would suggest those people come to Celtic Park for the game next weekend and they’ll see what is supposedly missing from the fixture.

Because should we win on Sunday, next weekend at Celtic Park will be a festival. It will be a celebration of Celtic.

McInnes and his team will take the usual amount of stick, obviously, but a celebration is exactly what it sounds like. It will be raucous. It will be loud. It will be electric.

The best atmosphere I have personally ever known at one of these games was in one of the matches, quite possibly the first one, where there were no Ibrox fans in the ground, the one under Ange where we won 3-0.

The only thing missing from that night was bigotry.

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