Oprah couldn’t sort out this right royal battle
Relations are at an all time low. Calls are not getting returned.
There are barbed comments in the media and it’s hard to believe they’ll ever see eye to eye again.
Never mind Harry and Meghan’s family feud, the real battle royal is happening in Glasgow right now.
It is not happening on the pitch.
It’s actually the suits in the boardrooms who have turned up the heat on the decades old cold war and there’s outright hostility behind the scenes at the clubs right now.
We’ll need more than an hour with Oprah to sort this one out.
No one can say it hasn’t been coming. There used to be a kind of unwritten rule, a mutual understanding between the clubs, that they do their dirty washing in private and avoid rinsing each other in public.
A set of away fans trash the home team’s toilets, a cheque is in the post and we say no more about it, as there’s a sensible understanding that the roles are likely to be reversed next time around.
Neither would comment on the other’s business as they knew if a finger points one way there could be three pointing back in the opposite direction.
Sure, there were times down the years when they couldn’t resist a pop – but nothing like the outright disdain being shown to their nearest and not so dearest right now.
We could get pofaced about it and talk about the responsibilities of the clubs to dial it down a notch and consider the ramifications of riling up the respective supports.
It would be nonsense though. Old Firm fans – oh, there are those dirty words – live in a state of rile anyway.
It doesn’t really matter a jot what their clubs say or do to change it.
Celtic and Rangers have been begging their fans to behave for years.
You can’t blame football clubs for individuals’ actions, whether they are lobbing fences or jumping on benches.
But you can rise above the mob. You kind of have to.
Instead we’ve got two clubs who are pandering to the mob.
It seems they have now become part of this world that lives for clicks and likes. It’s all a bit grubby.
We can’t just blame the pandemic either.
This was brewing before we all got stuck in the house, but the lockdown has only served to crank it up.
The Old Firm will dismiss social media when it suits them but in reality they are now slaves to it.
They are reacting to every stupid twitter storm or causing their own.
They take their lead from the message boards, put out statements on the back of any old online nonsense.
They’ve forgotten there is a big wide world beyond the world wide web – only about five per cent of Scots are on Twitter by the way.
Celtic’s toe-curling post in midweek was a case in point.
We’re not half of anything, not our problem, one club, it was your mad auntie on Facebook stuff.
Rangers have been guilty of it as well. Dave King couldn’t resist putting the boot into Celtic at times in the last week.
It might be understandable given the decade of dominance on one side of the city and pain on the other, but it only plays to the galleries and widens the wedge between the two.
The war has already damaged the fixture.
This last 12 fanless months have shown us how much a crowd is missed in football, with grounds turned in to soulless echo chambers.
But the Glasgow derby had already been diminished when King opted to slash the away allowance at Ibrox and Celtic didn’t hang about in doing the same.
The impact was noticeable. The games last season just weren’t the same.
It wasn’t quite a library but even the home crowds didn’t seem to have the same oomph with not much noise coming from the visitors’ section.
Folk tuning in abroad must have thought they’d ordered an Old Firm game from Wish.
No one is saying that these two clubs should run hand in hand through the meadow, but let the royal rumble remain on the pitch.
Instead of rising above it, the Old Firm are pandering to the mob