WE’VE all shouted things we shouldn’t at the football.
We’ve all unleashed abuse at refs or opposition players and fans, that we wouldn’t dream of saying to their faces if we met them in the street.
The guy who screams a racial taunt. The girl who screeches four-letter poison, while her kid stands at her side. It’s just emotion, albeit pointless and negative emotion. It’s just how we sometimes find ourselves reacting in the heat of the moment.
Even those songs we’re forced to endure every week, the ones those in power conveniently ignore when they should be driving them out of the game, suck in plenty who don’t mean a word of what they are singing.
That’s just mob mentality. It’s easy to be swept along. And when it comes down to it, for all that I’ll keep on fighting to have them silenced, they are only songs. For all that they cross a line, it’s only words, disappearing into the air as soon as they are spouted.
But if there’s a line those anthems and taunts cross, what can we say about the actions of some Hibs ‘hangers-on’ — let’s not afford them the privilege of being called fans — at Ibrox on Saturday? The ones who left behind them tangible, visible insults about the blackest day in Scottish football’s history?
To those wasters, to this bunch of small-minded, odious oxygen thieves, that line others cross is a dot on the horizon. Because while those insults we bawl or the chants some join in with are spontaneous, the references in graffiti and stickers to the Ibrox Disaster were planned.
And ask yourself, what kind of human being plans something that sick? Whether it was one ringleader, two pals or a dozen halfwits, someone had to come up with the idea of making grim Stairway 13 memorabilia well in advance. Someone had to mull over that idea, and decide the right thing to do was put it into practice. Someone had to go out and get made up those stickers mocking the place where all those souls died. Someone had to start others daubing seats with the fateful number 66.
For anyone to premeditate an act as shocking as it is heartless as it is criminal defies belief.
Yet there, once the away corner emptied, was the indisputable evidence. There, before our eyes, was a new low for the Scottish game.
Sure, today’s self-styled Ultras are proud of their wee calling cards, their scrawled tags and their we-wuz-here stickers. These carbon-copy clowns, in their identikit black hoodies and their scarves tied like a Boy Scout’s woggle, they love to let it be known on lamp-posts, bus shelters, and away-end lavvies that they have graced the world with their presence.
But that’s no more than the equivalent of mongrels marking their territory with pee. While what was left behind at Ibrox was properly nasty and sinister. Let’s be honest, it was pure evil.
Rangers and First Minister Humza Yousaf echoed each other’s thoughts, perhaps for the first time, that what the Hibs halfwits had done was outrageous. The Easter Road club described it as intolerable. Which is the key word here. Intolerable. As in, it will not — absolutely not in any way, under any circumstances — be tolerated.
It’s a promise we hear before every match, in every stadium every week about the sectarianism and other prejudices that will simply not be put up with. Only for it to be broken when all the usual venom pours out and it IS put up with.
If Hibs have anything about them, though, they will work with Rangers, Police Scotland and any decent, sane supporters who were in that away section to identify the morons who did this damage. They will ban them from every match their club plays from here to a day beyond eternity. Those morons know who they are. They know what they did.
They don’t even have the time-worn excuse of the racist, sexist, bigoted walloper who ends up in court whining the excuse that, “I had too much to drink and didn’t know what I was doing, your honour”. This time, they knew EXACTLY what they were doing.
Which is what makes it all the more shocking, and all the less tolerable, than most of the rubbish we have to put up with at the football these days.
These people are sub-humans. They are cowardly cretins who shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near civilised society, never mind granted entry into what should be a sporting event we encourage families to attend.
On which subject, as Celtic lock themselves into a stand-off with the self-entitled attention-seekers of the Green Brigade over their show of support for Palestine, you have to ask when the board will show the same level of courage over the backing that continues to pour out for the IRA.
Despite the naughty boys among their support being banned from Tynecastle, and despite the away contingent being shrunk down to a sliver in the corner of a stand, the same old party songs could still be heard.
After pro-Palestine banners and flags were flown at the recent home game against Kilmarnock, the club issues a statement that “we are not a political organisation” whose ground should not be “used as a vehicle for such messages”.
They “condemned” displays which “do not represent” Celtic.
So when’s the same statement coming on the IRA chants? When will they be publicly condemned? After all, I’m guessing that stuff doesn’t represent Celtic either.
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Bill Leckies piece from Scottish Sun. Not often I agree with him but he’s spot on here. Only bit I’d disagree with is they are Hibs supporters as I’m taking it those in attendance would be season ticket holders
