Referees' Strike - for those interested!

[shaunbhoy]

Couple if folks in the pub next door to my Cafe reckoned it was the 'super moon' wot caused the second Rangers goal to go in

Probably the same super moon that caused the Rangers players to go down like sniper victims every time another player came near them.

[pacharan]

Yawn. Again. This is just tedious now.

[Incognito]

Yawn. Again. This is just tedious now.

You do know you don't actually have to click on every thread if you don't have to. You're welcome to regale people of your interesting pasta and coffee soiree to the UAE in some other thread if you want.

[shaunbhoy]

Yawn. Again. I am just tedious now.

FTFY

[jmo21]

W I & SB S!

I'm not the biggest fan of these threads, but how much time do you have on your hands to have a whine about it?

Great game in the end, decent football played by both teams, a little bit of controversy here and there, not as much as normal possibly.

[Doggy Styles]

I think Scotland should be proud to have one of the most volatile local derbies in the world. Amongst proper football countries that is.

Off the top of my head, Boca Juniors v River Plate is probably the most "intense", but Celtic v Rangers can't be that far behind.

I suppose England's best would be West Ham v Millwall.

[minestrone]

From the London Times...

Another week, another excruciating example of the problem Rangers have with a large section of their support. Walter Smith’s team, going into Sunday’s Co-operative Insurance Cup final as underdogs, won quite a few admirers for their gritty 2-1 win over Celtic.
Alas, no one who was at Hampden Park as a neutral, and who had any understanding of the type of songs that were being sung, could have found anything remotely appealing in the antics of the Rangers support.
For fully 120 minutes the Ibrox legions belted out stuff about the Pope, Fenians, and some of their other favoured subjects.
Quite a few of us have become used to “the Rangers problem” over the years but Sunday at Hampden was still quite an eye-opener. It was the consistent, incessant nature of the bigoted chanting that was truly shocking.
One of the problems we have in tackling bigotry in Scottish football is the sheer ignorance of the subject that we have to put up with. For instance, Kenny MacAskill, the Scottish Justice Secretary, clearly didn’t have a clue what he was talking about, to judge from the fatuous statement he released after attending the match at Hampden.
After the prejudiced chants had boomed out, the following was MacAskill’s take on the whole spectacle. “This was the showpiece everyone wanted to see — it was a great advert for Scottish football,” he said. “The players, management and fans contributed to a memorable occasion, and I urge that their positive example inside the ground is replicated outside it over the course of the evening and beyond. Football is a force for good in society.”
Given the nature of what was chanted inside Hampden, this was an utterly ludicrous statement. MacAskill, clearly, is totally unfamiliar with the sort of problems given an airing at Hampden if he thinks that the sort of chanting which the Rangers fans kept up apace represented “fans contributing to a memorable occasion.” This is risible.
I didn’t expect a Rangers statement yesterday on the shocking tone of their supporters’ singing, and nor was one forthcoming. Rangers’ preferred position on their problem is this: let’s just have a general media silence on the subject, and let’s keep any fuss to a minimum. From Rangers’ point of view, the fewer headlines there are about their problem, the less need there is of any requirement to act.
But that is a tough scenario to hope for. The Ibrox club have already been censured by Uefa over bigotry, and more than that, a number of Rangers supporters’ songs have specifically been banned by European football’s governing body. So it is asking a lot for every newspaper to turn a blind eye (or deaf ear) towards songs which have repeatedly been outlawed.
What is more galling for those who want to be rid of this poison is the seeming ignorance — such as was revealed by MacAskill — or inability in government or police circles to be able to fix it.
Hampden on Sunday rang out to bigoted chanting from the Rangers end, yet the police statistics for “sectarian-related crimes” were paltry, never mind MacAskill’s absurd words about how wonderful it all was.
This isn’t government action. On the contrary, this is inaction, and even incompetence. The truth is, we are getting nowhere today with the problem of sectarianism in football. In fact, we are regressing, Edinburgh summits or not, at an alarming rate.
Rangers, in trying to fight their own specific problem, have lost ground. Indeed, if you were at Hampden on Sunday, with bigoted chant after chant ringing out, you would think that the club had gone back ten years in their quest to solve the problem. And for many others, meanwhile, it actually means very little.
OK, so there is sectarian chanting, they say. So what? What does it matter? Just let it go, let’s just concentrate on the football.
Rangers lack the guts to truly take on their own support on the issue, and the same applies for the Scottish FA.
The docking of points really would force the bigots to stop their chanting, and the SFA has the power to do this, but it is too scared to.
Meanwhile, too many other people won’t touch this problem with a bargepole, claiming the accompanying aggro that comes with such debate simply isn’t worth it.
So Scotland just goes on living with its embarrassing bigotry problem. Ignorance, incompetence and cowardice ensure it.

[shaunbhoy]

A journalist writing about another journalist writing about what other journalists aren’t doing wouldn’t normally interest this journalist…

However Roy Greenslade’s blog in the Guardian (below) about Graham Speirs piece in the Times does merit some attention I don’t think it is a coincidence that Roy’s piece is online and you are reading this via the same medium.

Speirs’ piece is, in part, about the extent to which the print sector in Scotland are silent about a serious social issue (the sectarianism and racism of Rangers fans) because they fear that it will adversely impact upon sales.

The MSM in Scotland, when it comes to keeping their head above water, dare not offend a large market. That means that any criticism of Rangers fans must be toned down if any criticism is published at all.

The behaviour of major Scottish print titles in “reporting” on the rioting by Rangers fans in Manchester in 2008 is a case in point. In one inciedent, copy filed from a reporter on his mobile phone in the midst of the riot was spiked. Only when Sky news accessed the CCTV footage (see end of piece) did the good folk of Scotland see what the people of England had been reading about that morning: Rangers fans on the rampage in Manchester, smashing the city and attacking stricken policemen.

Since Rangers were last censured by UEFA for discriminatory chanting in 2006 the song involved (the Billy Boys) has made its way back in to the Rangers song sheet.

I had discussed the entire issue with Speirs when we met in Dublin recently at the AVIVA stadium for an international football tournament. He told me, as he related later in the piece, that he was weary of the entire subject of the racism and sectarianism of Rangers fans.

Speirs deserves credit and praise.

He is unique among Scottish sports journalists in consistently tackling the issue of the racism and sectarianism among a section of Rangers fans. Although he has also been quick to call out the IRA fan club that follows Celtic he has been brave in avoiding the “one side is as bad as the other” mantra of other Scottish sports writers.

Anyone writing in Scottish football will privately acknowledge one side is actually worse than the other. This is reflected in football banning orders and the simple evidence of your ears anytime one cares to listen to the competing choirs when they are bon their travels to other SPL clubs.

One senior football administrator in a position to know told me that the problem of sectarian singing among Celtic’s travelling support was between 400 –700. (It is no secret that the denizens of the Celtic boardroom would love to see the back of these “Republicans”.) He also claimed that in Rangers’ case, the numbers were a significant proportion of their season ticket holders. “So the club can’t really act against that number.”

Rangers have only been censured by UEFA for “discriminatory chanting” and that was because it followed on from crowd trouble. The Rangers fans have worked out that they can chant with impunity in Scotland and in Europe.
But the sober men in Nyon that run European soccer barely understand why fans of a Glasgow football club chant anti-Catholic anti-Irish abuse when they are playing a team from Turkey.

This week I interviewed Piara Powar. He is the head of Football Against Racism in Europe (FARE). He is close to the thinking of the top guys in UEFA on these matters.
He told me that most teams in Europe with problematic fans had to be warned at the start of every tournament, but with Rangers they have to be warned at the start of every round of a competition!

However he stated that the lack of action by UEFA must be seen in the context of the apparent impunity which Rangers fans can wade up to their knees in Fenian blood and inform Glasgow’s Irish community that the Famine is over. Ultimately, Powar believes, the domestic association must take a stand.

A central part of Speirs’s thesis is that the SPL are much less likely to take such action because of the benign environment within which the malevolent voice choir at Ibrox operates. This leniency of Rangers has a knock on effect. Should, at some distant date, the SPL decide to sanction another club for the discriminatory chanting of their fans then that club could quite rightly point to the fact that the main offender goes unpunished despite being named in scores of SPL match delegate’s reports over the years.

This current state of affairs results, in part, from the failure of journalists in Scotland to uphold what is decent and legal.

Graham Speirs stands apart in that he has consistently called out the supporters of the club that he supported as a boy to behave in a civilised and law-abiding manner.

As I write this a stormy cup tie has just been played out at Celtic park between the two Glasgow clubs. Rangers had three players sent off. It was many things, but dull wasn’t one of them. This is what the TV companies love. They could sell this every week to their pay per view punters.

One colleague sent me a message just as the game finished he told me that the visiting tranche of Rangers supporters had indulged in the Billy Boys and the Famine song (both illegal in Scots law) at several junctures during the match. Once more they will do so with impunity. This was Scottish Cup tie and, therefore, the SFA is the governing body here, unlike a league match.

Will the SFA take action at this mass law breaking? Will they censure the “Establishment club”? I’m sure Graham Speirs would scoff at the notion of the Scottish soccer authorities finally taking on Rangers.

Yet there is a serious side to this breaching of the peace by thousands of Rangers fans.

How often is this malevolent voice choir the warm up act to serious violence after the match?

This week, as a panellist on Clyde 1 Super scoreboard he related a conversation he had recently with a senior Strathclyde Police officer. The copper told Speirs that over the last 20 years there had been “15 to 20 Old Firm related murders in Glasgow”.

Speirs then mentioned young Mark Scott, a Celtic Supporter whose Murder by Rangers fan Jason Campbell led to the setting up to the charity “Nil By Mouth”, to say that the memory of Mark spurred him on as a journalist.

So far he has largely undertaken this thankless, but vitally necessary journalistic task alone. Time for others in Scottish sports journalism to step up to the plate.

[Incognito]

And I present to you a prime case of Glasgow's finest, 'The Mock Offended'

Shocking sectarian bile isn't it. Oh wait a minute that's not the nasty Rangers fans singing that....

[Incognito]

Only a couple of hundred they say:

IRA song No.1