A former colleague of mine on the Record’s sports desk was on the Kaye Adams BBC Scotland show the other day. He’d been invited on to speak about the thousands of Rangers fans who’d broken Covid lockdown rules to take to the streets in celebration of their club’s title win.
Yet he, Adam Miller, hardly got the chance to speak. Another ex-colleague, from a different department and definitely from a different time and place, talked right over him, interrupted him, howled and hollered, and wasn’t reined in by a host who is usually a fine broadcaster but proved we can all have bad days at the office.
“They will abandon their wives, they will neglect their children, they will stick with their team through thick and thin,” Joan Burnie screeched.
“I’d have got out a water cannon and I would have filled it with disinfectant and I would have bunged that into George Square and I would have sprayed the lot of them.
“I am sick to death of football being treated like it’s some little Tin God. It doesn’t matter. People dying matters.”
If that was the level of debate, the plug should have been pulled on the programme. Instead, football was kicked all over the studio, and you know what, I’m sick to death of that.
The weekend scenes have dominated the news agenda for days now. Rangers have been battered by everyone from Nicola Sturgeon to whoever posts on the Celtic Twitter feed, desperately trying to curry favour with their own disgruntled fans by stating: ‘We’re not half of anything,’ in relation to being called the Old Firm.
This was posted just days after Celtic renewed their joint ownership of the term ‘Old Firm’ with the Intellectual Property Office. Which suggests communication within the club is as disjointed as it is when their players are trying to defend set pieces.
As for Rangers, they strongly denied that they’d done nothing to dissuade their fans from taking to the streets. They posted a robust defence pointing out the timeline of meetings and phone calls with stakeholders in the days and weeks running up to last weekend.
The fact is, no matter what the club said or did, irrespective of how vocal Steven Gerrard had been, nothing would have stopped the celebrations.
Does that make what happened right? Of course not.
But the blame for that rests with every single person who crossed their front doors to head to Ibrox, George Square or Auchenhowie. Not with a football club.
Just as it wasn’t Celtic’s fault when their fans headed for Parkhead in December to protest at the running of their club. Just as it wasn’t St Johnstone’s fault when their supporters ignored pleas not to go to McDiarmid Park in the wake of their Betfred Cup success.
Every individual is responsible for their own actions, yet it is big bad football that gets a kicking time and again.
Try telling the countless beneficiaries of the £300,000 given by the Celtic Charitable Foundation last April, to feed hungry children and the homeless that football doesn’t matter.
Ask those heroes who run the Glasgow City Mission what they think of the £210,000 the Rangers Charity Foundation have raised over the past five years to make sure homeless people have a roof over their heads and a meal in their stomach every night. That’s only a fraction of the £4.6m raised for good causes since it’s formation in 2002.
Go to a once suicidal person whose life has been saved by the incredible work Motherwell FC have done with mental health charities. Or the kids and their parents who have received food parcels and presents at Christmas from St Mirren players and manager Jim Goodwin.
The list is endless. Every club in the country is the heartbeat of its community.
Sometimes they get it wrong, but far more often they get it right. A bit like supporters really.
Those fans last weekend got it wrong. The vandalism in George Square was unforgivable but the fact that right-minded fans raised thousands to repair the damage within days didn’t get nearly the same publicity as the culprits did.
Maybe because that doesn’t suit the agenda of those who would prefer football to be locked up and the key thrown away.
It won’t happen. Anyone who thinks otherwise is Radio Rental.
